You’re Not Stringer Bell, but You May Still Need a Burner Phone

Even if surveillance overreach (abortion bounty-hunting, police use of face recognition) doesn’t make you want to ditch your smartphone for something less connected, you could still consider a burner phone, a practically disposable prepaid mobile device that’s not under contract with a wireless carrier.

Yep, prepaid cell phones that were popularized by brands like Boost Mobile and Cricket in the mid-aughts, and in pop culture by their frequent use in TV’s The Wire, are still around. In fact, tens of millions of customers still go for burner phones, whether they’re flip phones or smartphones on Android or iOS from providers such as Verizon-owned TracFone, Simple Mobile, or Total Wireless.

What’s the appeal? The idea is that a cheap phone with prepaid calling minutes and data is disposable, free of any contract commitment, and more private. For someone who uses a cell phone or data plan infrequently, it could be much cheaper than a typical mobile phone plan.

Prabhat Agarwal, senior director of research and trends at the Consumer Electronics Association, says that while wireless companies steer customers to post-paid plans with higher-margin 5G data plans and longer commitments, prepaid phones “are not going away anytime soon. There’s a lot of groups for which prepaid makes a lot of sense,” he explains.

If you pay cash for the hardware and the service, you are theoretically untethered from being traced to the phone with your bank account, credit card, or home address. Of course, that anonymity vanishes the moment you start using a burner phone to log in to your Facebook account or you commit a crime serious enough to warrant the authorities investigating who used a burner phone to, say, plan an Ocean’s 11-style casino heist.

Going off-grid isn’t the only reason to get a prepaid phone, though. Maybe you want a dedicated second phone for a side hustle like Lyft driving that doesn’t get used all the time, since it won’t be subject to use-it-or-lose-it monthly fees. You might be someone who wants to keep your online dating or personal email completely separate from the premium smartphone you use for work. Or you could use a cheap, locked-down phone that allows your kids to call friends and grandparents and play games. A cheap prepaid device won’t cause as much stress if the screen gets cracked or the handset ends up in the toilet.

In all these cases, a burner phone can allow you to be accessible by phone but with a different phone number than your main one. If you value keeping your main cell number nonpublic, but you still need to be reachable to a large number of people, a prepaid phone may be simpler than getting a second line or using a service like Google Voice.

How to Choose a Burner Phone

If that sounds interesting, the first thing you need to decide is how much burner phone you actually need. If it’s just for phone calls and light data communication, you could go retro with a flip phone and hope you remember how to use T9 texting.

Especially for smartphones, depending on the model, there might be limited built-in memory for apps, video, and other data. You may also need to supply your own SIM and SD cards to use the mobile network and expand the phone’s memory. Make sure you remove both of those cards before you get rid of the phone, or at least wipe the memory on the SD card first.

Expect to pay anywhere from $20 for a cheap flip phone to $300 or more for something like a fully loaded prepaid iPhone 11. If being untrackable is your primary goal, paying with a credit card or online account might defeat the purpose. Go to a store. Pay cash or use a gift card. Burn the receipt, or, better yet, don’t ask for one.

Prepaid phone plans that include voice, text, and data might be sold in time increments from a month at a time up to a year. Some may offer “unlimited” usage, but be sure to read the fine print on what that actually means. One thing to watch out for, Agarwal says, is that some prepaid data plans have much lower data allotments and may throttle the speed of the network even before you hit your data limit. You should also be aware of what wireless network the prepaid provider uses. For instance, Cricket uses AT&T’s mobile network, and TracFone is on Verizon’s. That matters less for privacy, but more for understanding where you’ll have service and what speed of wireless service will be available.

If you don’t want new hardware in your life, you could look for a software solution such as the aptly named Burner app, available for iOS and Android that promises to give you a second phone line and more privacy for $3.99 to $4.99 a month, depending on your plan.

How to Use a Burner Phone

First, as with any device, you’ll need to activate the phone. (There’s usually easy-to-follow instructions in the phone packaging.) You can keep buying additional data and voice minutes with prepaid cards you buy in stores or online.

Depending on the phone, you might have access to apps you’re already familiar with that offer good privacy and encryption options, such as Telegram or Signal. You could also use VPN apps to further anonymize your online activity.

However, you should understand that no matter how careful you are to protect your privacy, any login to a website from a burner phone or even hopping onto a Wi-Fi network could expose your location data and other private information. The Intercept has a good video guide geared toward protestors with tips to keep some of that data private.

Once you’re done with a burner phone, you can erase the data on it with a factory reset (don’t forget to wipe the SD card if one is in use). Then stash it away, throw it away, or resell it on the secondary market to a site such as Gazelle or Swappa. You may even be able to trade it in with a wireless carrier.