Cape

Verizon's new CEO recently said the company plans to move beyond "four segments" to "hundreds of thousands of segments." Their pitch is that hyper-segmentation benefits consumers because you pay for exactly what you need. But carriers sitting on rich behavioral data can also use it to charge each customer as much as they'll tolerate. Carriers already collect, analyze, and monetize subscriber data at scale. Pricing is the next frontier for that data to be applied against you. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/eKhPR2Cb

Cape submitted a formal comment to the FCC opposing a proposed rule that would require a government-issued ID and physical address for every phone line in the United States. The intended goal of the rule is to stop spammers and robocallers, which we support eliminating, but entrusting telecom carriers to effectively create and run a nationwide ID registry for every American with a phone is not the solution. Mobile carriers have been breached time and again because the incentives to secure trillions of dollars of legacy architecture aren’t there. Further enriching compromised telecom datasets with government ID, physical addresses, and alternate phone numbers harms our security rather than improving it. Read our comments to the FCC here: https://lnkd.in/eDRHxuVR

For nearly a decade, experts warned that commercially available location data could be used to track American troops. US Central Command has now confirmed it has received multiple threat reports of adversaries exploiting commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in the Middle East. The same data broker ecosystem that sells location data to advertisers, insurers, and employers doesn't distinguish between consumers and combatants. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/ezugyG8a

AI chatbots are giving out people's real phone numbers. Google's Gemini has been surfacing people's personal cell numbers as fake customer service contacts, misdirecting strangers to private individuals, and handing out colleagues' numbers on request. There's no reliable way to know if your number is in a model's training data, or even to get it removed. But, you can prevent your primary phone number from proliferating online in the first place with Cape's secondary numbers. Cape gives you two additional lines for signups, services, and public-facing use, keeping your primary number out of the data pools that end up in AI training sets. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/g9HdsR-E

Mobile phishing has overtaken email as the most significant social engineering threat facing organizations. The shift is largely driven by the maturation of email security. Phishing delivered via text, mobile apps, and voice calls are now achieving significantly higher engagement rates than email phishing. Users are approximately 40% more likely to interact with a malicious link or fraudulent request received on mobile than one delivered via email. The reasons aren't surprising: mobile interfaces display limited information about links and sender identities, and people tend to respond to phone notifications faster and with less scrutiny than they apply to desktop email. 🐟 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/e2kEgSuj

Privacy has always depended, in part, on friction. Connecting a pseudonymous account to a real identity, or making sense of scattered location pings and financial records, takes time, skill, and resources. That friction has been a practical ceiling on how broadly surveillance can be applied. LLMs may be dismantling that ceiling. A new piece from MIT Technology Review examines early evidence that LLM agents can assemble detailed profiles of individuals from commercially available bulk datasets. If that scales, the cost and effort of building a dossier on any given person drops dramatically. Not just for governments, but for insurers, employers, and anyone else with access to the right datasets. 🔗 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/euwsmY9T

Cape commissioned The Harris Poll to survey 2,000+ Americans on mobile privacy. The results reveal that despite the rise of secure communications platforms like encrypted chat apps, Americans still use phone calls and texts for their most sensitive interactions, with friends and family, banks, doctors, schools, and more. Even among encrypted chat users, the phone still reigns supreme for these use cases. What's amazing about the traditional phone line is its universal interoperability; you don't need the other party to download an app or be on the same platform. However, it's also that trusting architecture that makes it vulnerable, and those vulnerabilities are little known among the general public, as this Harris Poll shows: 📱 Fewer than 1 in 3 believe they've given their carrier permission to share their location, browsing behavior, or demographic data, even though it's on by default. 📱 63% think opting out of carrier data sharing is easy, yet opt-out rates sit below 1%. 📱 59% don't know that turning off location settings doesn't stop all forms of location tracking. The good news is that many still care about their data, and are open to more secure, privacy-protecting alternatives. 🔗 Read the full findings → https://lnkd.in/eV3KdzCi

🎙️ #Cape CEO John Doyle joined Crossing the Valley to talk about what it actually took to build a privacy-first carrier from the ground up. The conversation covers everything from Cape's $5M seed that turned into $50M to go live, the Kansas City red team exercise that unlocked our Series A, to how we're becoming America's answer to Huawei. Full episode available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack: 🎥 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eK_7kMDh 🎙 Apple: https://lnkd.in/eX_y2MCt 📖 Substack: https://lnkd.in/egMKwAZk 🎵 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eRtG2ncS

Thank you to Founder Brew for featuring our CEO John Doyle alongside other veteran founders on the lessons military life brings to building a company. 🔗 Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/ephguDHQ

🎉 Cape is honored to be named a winner of Fast Company's 2026 World Changing Ideas Awards! “There are app-level solutions like VPNs and encrypted chat apps, but all of them ride atop an underlying network, and you can't solve digital privacy without addressing the vulnerabilities that live at the cellular network layer. This can only be done by redesigning a telco from the ground up, with privacy and security as first principles. We’re a core infrastructure player across every sector–government, consumer and enterprise–because everyone should be able to stay connected without compromising their privacy and security.” ~John Doyle, CEO of Cape See the full writeup: https://lnkd.in/eRqRCUBY