Thanks very much for posting, I’ve been considering experimenting with them myself so great to hear a bit about them.
Do you get to choose (presumably via some standard phone settings, like turning off “Automatically select network” in Android) which operator to connect to if there is more than one available? Or does it always use the one with the strongest signal?
I have seen various people saying they are suspicious over the years but to some extent I don’t care. silent.link won’t have my ID or payment details to abuse, any mobile network is going to spy on my traffic and it seems the worst that’s going to happen is they do a bunk with my $10 of credit, which is a risk I can live with. And they have been around for a few years now without AFAICS any major scandal.
My main temptation to try them is that they look like a cheaper option than local cash-paid SIMs for my needs. Cash SIMs seem either very expensive for small quantities of data (roughly $0.10/megabyte, vs $2/gigabyte for silent.link) or want me to pay a large amount every month for a much bigger data allowance than I need on mobile, albeit at a fair price per gigabyte.
It also looks good that the credit never expires. Do they really mean that - could I have the eSIM and not use it for two years and still have my credit?
Even if my main reason for considering them is the price, any extra privacy benefits are welcome. Their FAQ says:
With Anonymous eSIM, your actual mobile number is not known to your local mobile network provider, as you are in roaming. Therefore, your adversary cannot collude with your local mobile network provider to run various attacks, that are easy with ordinary mobile subscribers, such as:
- SimToolKit attack. Using a special service SMS and a secret Ki key attacker can control subscriber’s SIM card (or eSIM chip) and, using a special surveillance interface built into every GSM phone, eavesdrop on the subscriber during calls or standby.
- Monitor subscriber’s location
- Log subscriber’s calls, messages and data sessions
I’m no mobile network expert, but this feels a bit suspect/technobabble/snake oil. (A shame, as almost everything else on their site feels fairly honest.) Is there actually any concrete privacy advantage here? Surely the SIM still has some kind of ID and therefore its location can be tracked, for example, even if it is not directly tied to my real world identity.
Is a silent.link eSIM any different from a cash paid local SIM in practice from a privacy point of view?
I could believe there might be a security advantage from not having a mobile number, or having one which even I don’t know and which doesn’t really work, but I’m not sure.
Are there any other downsides beyond the ones @vincente mentions? I do wonder if having a silent.link SIM in my phone might look slightly suspicious to any monitoring authorities, but I don’t actually have anything to hide so even if that’s true maybe it doesn’t matter.