Although often associated with shady or illegal activity, burner phones can play a vital role in ensuring the privacy, security, and physical safety of journalists, activists, undercover operatives, and protesters. They can also be useful when traveling and as back-up emergency phones.
In this article, we’ll look at:
- What is a burner phone?
- Why use a burner phone?
- Should you use a smartphone as a burner phone?
- How to buy a burner phone
- Can burner phones be tracked?
- How to dispose of a burner phone
- Burner phones are useful tools when used right
What is a burner phone?
A burner phone is a disposable prepaid mobile phone intended for short-term use before being discarded. They’re often used for temporary communication and are typically purchased with cash to ensure anonymity. Burner phones are popular among those who want to maintain privacy or avoid being tracked.
Typical characteristics of a burner phone include:
- Prepaid: No contract
- Low cost: Usually a cheap device, often without advanced features
- Minimal personal info required: You can often buy one without giving much (or, ideally, any) personal identification
- Temporary use: Often used for short-term needs or privacy concerns
Burner phones are almost always used with burner SIMs — SIM cards purchased as anonymously as possible, where you pay in advance for minutes, texts, and data. Burner SIMs can be purchased preinstalled on burner phones or separately.
A burner phone without a burner SIM does little to protect your privacy, so for the rest of the article, when we refer to a “burner phone”, know we’re referring to both..
Why use a burner phone?
A variety of professions call for burner phones for different reasons. For example:
- Journalists and whistleblowers: Reporters often use burner phones to protect their sources and maintain the confidentiality of sensitive information.
- Law enforcement: Undercover officers may use burner phones to communicate without revealing their true identities or locations.
- Activists and protesters: Burner phones are ideal for short-term or one-time events that are subject to heavy state surveillance, such as protests(ventana nueva). These phones can be used to safely coordinate actions under regimes that monitor or suppress dissent.
- Businesspeople: You may want to use burner phones to separate your personal and professional communications or conduct confidential negotiations. As a freelancer, for example, you may prefer not giving your personal number to clients.
- Travelers: If you travel to a foreign country, you might use burner phones to avoid roaming charges and to have a local number for emergencies.
- Privacy-conscious individuals: Anyone concerned about privacy and security might use a burner phone to keep their personal communications private. For example, you might use one to sign up for an online dating service you don’t trust.
- Criminals: Unfortunately, criminals also use burner phones to avoid detection and surveillance by law enforcement.
Should you use a smartphone as a burner phone?
Most burner phones are “dumb” phones because:
- They’re cheap
- There are fewer ways to track you on a dumb phone than on a smartphone (such as GPS).
However, SMS messages and voice calls are unencrypted with a dumb phone, making them very far from private. The protection they afford relies solely on it being difficult to associate any activity on the phone with your real-life identity.
Even second-hand and low-end smartphones tend to be much more expensive than most dumb phones, but they have the big advantage of being able to run apps that can protect your privacy much better than SMS and standard mobile phone calls. These include:
- End-to-end encrypted(ventana nueva) (E2EE) messenger apps(ventana nueva) such as Signal. (Proton tip: A burner phone makes an ideal way to sign up for a Signal account without handing over your real phone number. Once registered, you can sign in to Signal on any phone.)
- The ability to take encrypted video footage and upload it somewhere else (an invaluable tool for many journalists and activists)
- VPN apps such as Proton VPN, which can be used in guest mode without needing to sign up for an account
Smartphones also offer other advantages. They can be secured using full-disk encryption to ensure the contents are inaccessible to third parties (this usually requires shutting the phone down). Many messenger apps also offer E2EE voice calls, ephemeral messages that disappear after a set period of time, and PIN locks to prevent anyone unauthorized from opening the app, even if they they have physical access to the phone.
If you go the smart burner phone route, be sure to take the following precautions:
- Factory reset the phone (if it’s second-hand). This will remove any personal data and settings from the previous owner and ensure that your burner phone starts with a clean slate.
- Don’t use your real accounts (Google, Apple ID, email, etc.) when setting up the phone. Create new burner ones instead.
- Don’t sync contacts or apps from your main phone.
- Don’t sign in to iCloud or Google accounts that can track you.
- Turn off GPS and other location services.
- Disable Bluetooth and unnecessary services.
- Use a VPN to hide your real IP address at all times.
How to buy a burner phone
Many electronics stores, supermarkets, and even convenience stores sell prepaid phones, which you can pay for practically anonymously using cash.
In many countries, it’s perfectly legal to buy prepaid SIM cards without any proof of ID. In the United States, for example, the following carriers are popular choices for use with burner phones:
- TracFone
- Metro by T-Mobile
- Boost Mobile
- Cricket Wireless
Many countries, however, require you to provide ID when purchasing a SIM card. In this case, your best option may be to obtain an international SIM card from somewhere with less stringent requirements. Avoid using eSIMs, as these are hard to pay for anonymously.
Can burner phones be tracked?
As long as a phone is turned on, the SIM card provider will know its approximate physical location. This is true for even the most basic dumb phone without GPS, Bluetooth, and other more advanced tracking vectors, thanks to cell-phone triangulation(ventana nueva). This measures the distance of the phone from the cell phone towers within the radius of the radio signal it continually emits.
Similarly, authorities use cell-site simulators(ventana nueva) (also known as a CSS, IMSI catcher, or Stingray) to identify phones (smart or dumb) within their range, often with the aim of identifying people who attend protests.
Smartphones leak a considerable amount of location data, but if you can mitigate this by turning off GPS, Bluetooth, and other location data, and avoiding signing in to accounts using personal information that can be traced back to you,
How to dispose of a burner phone
The whole point of a burner phone is that it’s temporary. Once it has served its purpose, you should dispose of it properly to ensure your personal data isn’t compromised and the phone can’t be traced back to you. Here are some steps you can follow:
- Back up important data: If there is any important data on the phone that you want to keep, back it up to a secure location. Proton Drive is ideal for this, as it stores files in the cloud using end-to-end encryption so that only you can access them.
- Destroy the SIM Card: Remove and physically destroy the SIM card by cutting it into pieces or using a hammer to break it.
- Destroy or remove any memory cards: If your burner phone has a memory card (not many do these days, but old phones make good burner phones), you can also destroy it the same way as the SIM card. If you decide to keep it, be sure to store it somewhere safe.
- De-register any accounts you’ve used on the phone: If you’ve been careful, no accounts should have any of your personal information anyway. But it’s always a good idea to tie up loose ends. Note that you can safely transfer Signal and many other secure messaging app accounts to a new phone.
- Factory reset: Perform a factory reset on the phone to erase all your data. Here are the official instructions for doing this on an iPhone(ventana nueva). On a Samsung OneUI phone, open the Settings app and go to General management → Reset. The instructions will be similar for other Android phones. Most dumb phones also have a factory reset option in their settings menus.
- Physically destroy the phone (optional): Destroying the SIM card is far more important than destroying the phone itself, but it never hurts to be too careful. If you have a heightened threat model(ventana nueva), you can smash your phone with a hammer or drill holes into it.
- Recycle or donate it: Given that the phone itself (without the SIM card) poses minimal threat to your privacy, a more environmentally responsible option is to recycle it at a certified e-waste recycling center, or to donate or sell it.
- Keep it: Another option is to simply keep the phone and buy a new burner SIM
Final thoughts — Burner phones are valuable tools when used right
Burner phones have a bad reputation thanks to their popularity with criminals, but there are many legitimate and useful reasons to use one. The real trick is to remember that it’s a burner phone — to be effective, you should not use it for anything personal and discard it once it’s served its purpose.
