I remember the old days when Sprint stores had walk-up kiosks like ATMs, which accepted card or cash payments for all accounts (including pre-paid).
There are zero methods to prevent intrusion into your private spaces by governments large or small. Even if you worked inside a large organization it does not matter since the spy on each other. Look at this link from Wikipedia. In 2013, the NSA asked its employees to voluntarily admit if they were using the abilities of the NSA to spy with no legal permission. Over a dozen of them admitted to illegal spying. No employees went to prison and several were promoted. LOVEINT - Wikipedia
You can use the search engine of your choice to ask the company T- Mobile to provide a list of MVNO’s that use their services and then select one from the lit that meets your needs. Example. I selected the “T Mobile prepaid” which is just a small department within T Mobile USA. I save lots of money over the typical T Mobile month to month contract for several reasons. One reason is that I can pay for a cellphone without being subsidized through what is essentially an annual loan agreement. I pay for what service I want in advance aka “T Mobile prepaid”. It may sound confusing to you initially but I have learned that many regular T Mobile retail store employees do not know it exists. Why? Lack of training and they may be concerned o9nly with bonuses and commissions from the typical annual post pay contracts.
I like “T Mobile prepaid” as my MVNO especially because most of my cell phone data use is via WiFi which does not have a data or speed cap. I have a personal unlimited speed or data cap on my home internet service so why would I want to voluntarily pay a higher bill. Most of my “mobile data” us is on my property. When I plan on traveling to another area, I call up my T Mobile Prepaid plan to optimize for my expected needs. Simple for my needs. I typically use a very large amount of “mobile data” each month but it is almost free since I use my own WiFi.
I can confirm that having installed a metadata analysis software at a known US entity back in 2003. I was actually impressed how good and accurate it was for the epoch.
Note that now, every browser shoots out your geolocation data if you are not careful about it ![]()
I’d like to add my 2 cent on privacy.
The main thing is to prevent my data to be sent out to one of the many 3rd party google, Apple, Microsoft, my banks (yes, they are the worst, as you can’t really deactivate all that crap) “work” and share our data with.
At the same time, when doing that, I literally draw a target on my back in terms of AI behavior analysis. Too many incoherence’s for a normal person.
Thing is - if you really want your privacy, you need to stick to certain rules and these require knowledge and skill.
- Have your own DNS Server and caching resolver
- Have your own secured mail-server giving you the ability to configure aliases.
- Create the main mail account with a password, but never use that one. Instead, only use aliases specifically created on a per shop, service requirement. Means I have a dedicated email alias for google, banks, every shop etc. out there. Currently, my family uses around 500 aliases. These are assigned by the mail-server I control on arrival.
This has also the very big advantage, that any email brute force attack will never get through, as no password is associated with any alias. At the same time, using fail2ban on my mail-server, I use this as attack-server detection and these go straight into my blacklist. - Have your own cloud (internal) and configure all systems on your devices to use it.
- Never use antivirus software. You need to know that to implant itself, the AV software open up holes in the system it implants itself, enlarging the possible attack surface. Of course, best is to use Linux as OS.
- Use browsers that do not leak your data. Currently, even if I don’t like the guy making it for personal reasons, I use mostly “Brave” on my devices.
- On computers, I only use open-source software (my entire family does, and I have 2 artists and 2 historians doing just well using Linux KDE Neon).
- Your home internet connection. I hope that you all realize that every ISP has access to your entire LAN if you let them use their equipment. Reason I replace all ISP provided equipment by default (yeah, kind of a pain to replicate their network on your router, then secure it down so they don’t have access to your LAN).
- And make sure you are using blacklists and RPZ (Response Policy Zone). This literally tells your DNS resolver to return a 0.0.0.0 for known data-leaches or nasty hosts. With that, you reduce commercials by 95% already, but also avoid your data being sent to them. But that only works when using your own resolver.
- Mobile phone sim-card. Well, you can’t really hide where you are (at least when ISP’s use triangulation to pinpoint your whereabouts). What you can do is really make sure your geolocation data does not leak. This means that you need to use a back-homing VPN to your own secured network, and query your personal DNS Server. Everything will go back to 1 IP address, which is at the location of your DNS Server (you can put that one into the internet BTW, at a hoster) so all they get is the IP if the data-center

- Disable all google talk, alexa or siri capabilities of your devices. Have you wondered why you get commercials on things your discussed with friends just hours before? Well, these devices are always in listening mode in the background (greatest privacy invasion BTW).
So - privacy is a very sensitive and overly complex thing. But there are so many things you need to take into account, that it becomes a nightmare.
My setup has grown over time. Every time I browse the net and find something new affecting privacy, I’m interested in and see if I can counteract what the industry puts in place.
My last bit is a AI honey pot. I literally feed them books containing junk not associated with our time but return them one character per second (which is really slow). I have had some AI bots in my honey pot weeks
This is for the bots not respecting the robot.txt directive.
You all need to know that I do this as a hobby for over 30 years now. So it kind of grew over time. But as I said, I have a huge target on my back because of that. And what I listed here is just a small part of all I do in regards of keeping my privacy.
Have time to put a course together for newbies?
I wish it was that simple. But in the case of privacy, there are so many things to take into account. Like the router you use, the OS you use, the mail-server you use, the dns-server you use - all are configured differently and have different aspects to take into account.
I went through 5 different mail-servers. It was a pain to set these up ![]()
And most of the things, I couldn’t brain dump like this. Too much. And as long as I’m paid for regular work, I wouldn’t find the time to set something decent up.
Maybe when I retire (7.5 years to go
) that could be an option ![]()
You submitted useful information. Thanks
I paid for a phone number, Now how does this work on my Brax 3 cellphone. Do i have to download a Esim from Brax? How do i get the number on my brax 3 cellphone?