Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbon Here. You may hear about them on the news or in a movie with the suspect used a burner phone to contact the family after the kidnapping, or you might have seen them at a convenience store. Burner phones are cheap phones that come with pre paid minutes. These are simple devices that tend to resemble old flip phones, though they often have touchscreens and smartphone features as well.
These burner phones come preloaded with a certain amount of call minutes or text messages, which can also be reloaded when exhausted. For the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke via email with Shanel Agarwal, a cyber expert who currently serves as a CCO for the software and web development company tech Ahead. He said people who want to remain private were anonymous for a variety of reasons, such as journalists, activists, or people engaging in
illegal activities frequently use them. Other common users include those who want to keep their identity a secret. This can be great if, for example, a person trying to get out of a bad home situation doesn't want their texts or calls to be monitored by volatile members of the household, but on a larger scale. Even if you pay cash for the phone and the minutes, it doesn't mean that you're totally incognito to the powers that be. A cell phones can be easily tracked and mined for data by
app developers, third party advertisers, and even local governments. In the United States, the legislative acts such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the infamous Patriot Act have given the federal and state governments great power when it comes to tracking and retrieving wireless communications. Ostensibly, these laws concerned matters of national security, but they've been used as a pretense numerous times by law enforcement to surveil the lives
of ordinary citizens. In most cases, the acies invoking these acts aren't even required to obtain a formal search warrant. Some activist groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU, consider this to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. More recently, law enforcement agencies have added a
tool known as the stingray to their arsenal. These devices have been suspected to be deployed during mass protests, including the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in twenty twenty. The stingray is essentially a small temporary cell tower that inserts itself as a bottleneck between mobile phones and their networks. If you're in range of a stingray, then your phone will automatically connect to it as if it were a legitimate tower.
You'll be able to use mobile data as normal, but things like calls, text messages, and passwords may be covertly intercepted by the party but controls the antenna. Private companies can also declare open season on your mobile data. Given some smartphone apps some permissions to access things like your location, contact list, or microphone shady developers can then turn around and sell this data to advertisers and government entities as
an underhanded way of making extra money. All that being said, burners do have their advantages. Normal cell phones usually require a carrier wireless plan, which comes with a contract that's tied to the user's legal name. This means any data scraped from your phone can easily be tied to your identity. Burner phones add an extra layer of protection because they can usually be purchased with cash and with no contract required.
Agarwall said burner phones can be beneficial for keeping privacy and anonymity in certain situations, such as when dealing with sources as a journalist, or while going to a new country where local simcards may be necessary. To make sure that their anonymity and privacy continues, users of these phones will often disconnect or burn the dive after a certain amount of time, or even throw it away. If anonymous calls are still needed, they'll replace the phone with a
new prepaid number. If a third party happens to be scraping the device for data, then this method ensures that their information stream will end when the phone is burned. Burner phones offer the strength of anonymity upon purchase, but otherwise they possess the same weaknesses as other phones. Agarwal said. While burner phones offer a higher level of anonymity compared
to regular phones, they're not completely untraceable. Burner phones can be traced by law enforcement agencies using various methods such as call detail records, location tracking, surveillance, and stingray devices. But furthermore, if a third party has recordings of your calls and texts, it's possible that they could identify you using contextual information or simply by the sound of your voice. Law enforcement agencies also possess voice recognition technology that can
assist in matching a voice to its source. It's because of these ever present surveillance methods that burning the phone every so often is important to staying anonymous. Agarwal said. These methods can reveal information regarding calls made and received by the burner phone, such as the time of day, the length of time, and the location. Law enforcement authorities have had some success in determining the identities of people
using burner phones in several instances. Of course, if you log into your Facebook or TikTok account from your burner phone, or buy some goods from Amazon, that will certainly blow your cover. But burner phones are just one type of gadget that can be used to boost your cybersecurity. They aren't infallible, and they're best employed in conjunction with other methods,
Agarwal said. For instance, encrypted messaging applications like Signal offer end to end encryption, which means that the only people who can read the messages are the sender and the recipient, not even the app providers. Themselves can access the information. In addition, making use of a virtual private network often known as a VPN can assist in preventing the parties from tracking your location data as well as the online
activities that you participate in. Piling methods of data abstraction on top of each other will go a long way toward maintaining anonymity. Still, it's important to remember that none of them are perfect. At the end of the day, data can be tracked, the best encryption has the potential to be broken, and the only one hundred percent secure form of communication is face to face conversation with someone you trust. Today's episode is based on the article are
burner phones really Untraceable? On how stuffworks dot com? Written by Talenthomer. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.