Telecom breaches, surveillance overreach, and digital identity attacks have become painfully common—and painfully predictable. Every few months, headlines reveal how traditional carriers expose users to privacy and security failures.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
At Cape, our network is built from the ground up to resist these threats. Here’s a breakdown of our five core protections—and how each one could have stopped the attacks that made the news.
More private.
Other Carriers: Excessive Collection, Long Retention
Traditional telcos collect and retain large amounts of metadata like call logs, timestamps, and phone numbers for years. This metadata, while seemingly harmless, can reveal sensitive relationships, patterns of communication, and private associations.
Cape: Minimal Collection, Maximum Protection
Cape collects only what’s necessary to provide service. No names, no street addresses, no emails. Our systems are designed to forget rather than remember, with strict data retention policies that keep your metadata from being stored, sold, breached, or subpoenaed.
Examples:
More secure
Other Carriers: Trust-Based Systems Are a Hacker’s Playground
Most telecom infrastructure is decades old and depends on implicit trust between systems for operability and connectivity. This trust creates significant vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. Once in, attackers can move laterally with ease. Cloud environments are often unprotected by MFA, and outdated mobile cores are easy targets.
Cape: Secure by Design
At Cape, we employ a minimal-trust approach, encrypting both internal and external workflows wherever possible, enforcing MFA on every system, implementing fine-grained access controls and audit logs for transparency, and deliberately storing as little information in our systems as possible. Unlike most other digital telcos, or “MVNOs”, Cape has built and operates its own cloud-based mobile core, meaning we’re not stuck relying on insecure legacy infrastructure.
Examples:
No selling your data
Other Carriers: You’re the Product
From selling real-time location data to sharing geolocation with law enforcement or third-party vendors, traditional carriers have a long history of monetizing user data—often without appropriate user consent.
Cape: You’re Our Customer.
Our business depends on protecting your privacy, not monetizing it. We never sell or share your data—not with marketers, not with data brokers, not even with law enforcement. We fight overbroad requests and notify users of any lawful process seeking disclosure.
Examples:
SIM Swap Protection
Other Carriers: SIM Swaps Exploit Human Error
Traditional customer accounts for cell phone service are protected by usernames and passwords, and rely on customer support agents or employees to manage account changes like number transfers. These weak account security methods allow for SIM swaps, which occur when bad actors socially engineer, bribe, or threaten telco employees to transfer your number to a different phone number. Once a number is stolen, attackers can bypass 2FA, access accounts, and impersonate the victim.
Cape: No Passwords, No Human-in-the-loop
Cape eliminates passwords and passcodes. Instead, SIM management requires a cryptographic passphrase stored only on your device. Even Cape employees cannot initiate a SIM port—only you can, through your device.
Examples
Enhanced Signaling Protection
Other Carriers: SS7 and Diameter Are Unlocked Doors
Legacy signaling protocols like SS7 and Diameter allow malicious actors to track your location, intercept calls, or redirect texts with minimal effort. These attacks are hard to detect and even harder to stop once they start.
Cape: Proprietary Signaling Proxy Blocks the Threat
Cape has removed direct SS7 dependencies and route all Diameter requests through our own secure signaling proxy. Any requests to update location or redirect calls are verified in real-time through your Cape app, which allows us to block any malicious signaling attacks.
Examples
Telecom security failures have become routine.
Cape was built to change that.
We believe that privacy and security is a basic right, and that connectivity in the modern world should not come at the expense of an exposed digital identity. We’re creating a fundamentally different mobile experience—one where your carrier is no longer the weak link in your security chain.