Post #17876 by Mark on the Berkshire Hathaway board

Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A)

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privacy‑focused mobile service

Sounds good, but is mostly nonsense. To maintain true privacy, A LOT/b> more needs to be done. And no normal person, or even slightly abnormal person, would ever do those things.

Just because there is no name attached to the phone doesn't mean you have any semblance of privacy. The prone still has an IMEI, and it can be tracked rather easily. Add to that, that payments can also be easily tracked, and pretty quickly this provides no meaningful privacy.

If you want any privacy, you would have to keep the phone OFF most of the time, and not turn it ON in regular places (meaning, you have to turn it on randomly in random places). That means the phone can't be ON at home ... because wherever the phone is ON in the evenings and night, or just a large percentage of the time, is "home". Furthermore, you can't turn the phone on each time you reach a mile or so away from home, because after a few days/weeks, your path can indicate roughly where "home" is. And you are bound to forget once in a while and then "home" becomes obvious. Even if "home" is an apartment building with 100 tenants, with a little more effort, your specific apartment can be found, probably 99% of the other tenants can rapidly be excluded because they use their cellphones normally ... and that leaves ... you, the one with the weird cellphone habits. Even if you pay with a different prepaid card every month (and that's a big pain), with som effort, they can track where that prepaid card was purchased, and again slowly zero in on your identity when necessary. It would become so unwieldy that nobody, not even an arch criminal would do this. What criminals do instead is have random street people buy cheap prepaid phones, use them for a few days, and then discard them. Nothing to trace because nothing exists. See Better Call Saul for a reasonable depictions of such use - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3032476

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