Phreeli founder Nick Merrill “is somebody who is extremely principled and willing to take a stand for his principles,” EFF’s Cindy Cohn told @WIRED. “He's careful and thoughtful, but also, at a certain level, kind of fearless.” https://t.co/uTgl0dxa0v
It's tempting to think of Phreeli as a phone service where every phone is a burner phone. But Merrill resists that description. Instead, he argues that an anonymous phone service should be as normal as curtains on your home's windows.
Providing someone cell service without knowing their name is, surprisingly, legal across the US. Anonymous payments are trickier, but Phreeli will use a crypto system based on "zero knowledge proofs" to separate payment info from phone records—even if you pay with a credit card.
Now he's launching a cellular provider designed to know almost nothing about you. Phreeli will function as a kind of layer on top of a T-Mobile's network. The cell towers are T-Mobile’s, but the contracts with users—and choices about what data to collect from them—are Phreeli’s.
Phreeli's founder is Nicholas Merrill, who became famous in the privacy world for refusing to comply with a warrantless FBI surveillance order sent to his internet service provider in 2004. He spent a decade-plus in court fighting it—and won.
Now, Merrill has launched a phone company: Phreeli (as in “speak freely”) aims to give its users the closest thing possible to anonymity, a goal it achieves by collecting almost no identifiable information about them.
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