This RCA message archiving feature is on “fully managed” Pixel devices, which are COBO: corporate owned, business only. You shouldn’t be doing anything personal on such devices.

There’s also “work profile” which is a different kind of management for mixed personal and work use. With work profile, the admin has no visibility into the personal side of the device.

It’s simplest and safest to follow what you wrote and never bring personal and work anywhere near each other. But there’s downsides to that, like having to carry two phones. I think there’s some situations where most people will feel safe doing personal things on a work device.

Stingray phone trackers and similar IMSI catchers are a kind of honeypot.

ANOM wasn’t until it was, and then it shut down. I recommend the Darknet Diaries episode to hear the story.

We secure your account against SIM swaps…with modern cryptography protocols.

This just dosent make ANY sense. Sim swaps are done via social engeneering.

See this for details. Their tech support people do not have the access necessary to move a line so there’s nobody to social engineer. Only the customer can start the process to move a line after cryptographic authentication using BIP-39.

proprietary signaling protection

If they wanted to be private, it would be Open source.

I’m really tired of this trope in the privacy community. Open source does not mean private. Nobody is capable of reviewing the massive amount of code used by a modern system as complex as a phone operating system and cellular network. There’s no way to audit the network to know that it’s all running the reciewed open source code either.

Voicemails can hold sensitive information like 2FA codes.

Since when do people send 2fa codes via voicemail? The fuck? Just use signal.

There are many 2FA systems that offer to call your number so the system can tell you your 2FA code.

The part where I share your reaction to Cape is about identifying customers. This page goes into detail about these aspects, and it has a lot of things that are indeed better than any other carrier out there.

But it’s a long distance short of being private. They’re a “heavy MVNO”. This means their customers’ phones are still using other carriers’ cell towers, and those can still collect and log IMSI and device location information. Privacy researchers have demonstrated that it is quite easy to deanonymize someone with very little location information.

On top of that, every call or text goes to another device. If it goes through another core network, most call metadata is still collected, logged, and sold.

If we accept all of Cape’s claims, it’s significantly better than any other carrier I’m aware of, but it’s still far from what most people in this community would consider private.

This is too techno-utopian. There’s also a place for governments. Comprehensive privacy legislation would also change the world for the better. Ignoring that is exactly what the largest invaders of privacy want.

Also delete your expired certificate if you have one (for example after a year)

This is likely a bad mistake. Keep the old cert around.

There’s two possibilities:

The first possibility is that Actalis uses the same key pair for the new cert. This is not a great approach because it doesn’t defend against a leaked key or key overuse. After all, if the key can be trusted longer than a year, the first cert they issued should be valid for longer.

The second, and much worse possibility, is that renewing the cert gets a different private key. This can case data loss. Deleting the old identity means you lose the ability to decrypt any messages that were encrypted using that key! Even if your mail client stores the previously encrypted emails in decrypted form, you may receive a new email from a sender who does not yet have your new cert.

Actalis sends you your private key. This means they have access to your private key, and theoretically could use it to sign and decrypt your emails. A more secure but somewhat more complex system would use a certificate signing request (CSR) instead. In that case, you are the only person who ever has your private key, so only you can sign or decrypt your email.

An old favorite of mine is Harvest: Massive Encounter. Expand, harvest, defend, optimize, and eventually get wiped out.

It tells when the user is online. This is useful for sending spam, because being on top of the inbox makes it more likely your message will be read.

To be fair, I doubt anyone’s implemented this specifically for ICMP. Instead I’d expect tracking that watches for any IP traffic whatsoever, and that happens to include ICMP.

ICMP reveals your IP address, which is easily correlated with other traffic…

There’s a fatal flaw in the premise. It is impossible to fasten something to a cat.

Authorities with a warrant can drill into a safe to get to its contents. That’s legally distinct from forcing someone to unlock the safe by entering the combination. It takes some mental effort to enter a combination, so it counts as “testimony”, and in the USA people can’t be forced to testify against themselves.

The parallel in US law is that people can be forced to unlock a phone using biometrics, but they can’t be forced to unlock a phone by entering a passcode. The absurd part here is that the actions have the same effect, but one of them can be compelled and the other cannot.

The downloadable shortcut described here also worked for me.

I assume you’re referring to Safari on iOS. I was able to select all on that Project Gutenberg page with a little-known scrolling trick:

1. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Yes, this part is a bit annoying but I was able to do that in 8 seconds with 25 full-screen flicks.
2. Long-press near the bottom of the page to start text selection.
3. Grab the bottom lollipop and drag it to the end of the page to select the last character.
4. Grab the top lollipop and drag it around a little to select more text. Don’t release it, and hold it still.
5. With a different finger, tap the status bar at the top of the screen. This is a shortcut for scrolling to the top of the page. Give it a couple seconds to finish scrolling. If you move the lollipop at all while it’s scrolling it will interrupt the scrolling, so keep that finger still until it’s done.
6. Now that you’re near the top of the page, drag the lollipop to the very top of the page and release it. The copy option should appear.

This is a terrible idea. It’s negligibly better than writing down the passwords, because it’s trivially easy to try every password represented on this card. Once someone has the card, your entropy is just two characters, which is the two characters you memorize for the site. In effect, you have a 2 character password.