We answer the questions readers asked in response to our guide to anonymizing your phone
About the LevelUp series: At The Markup, we’re committed to doing everything we can to protect our readers from digital harm, write about the processes we develop, and share our work. We’re constantly working on improving digital security, respecting reader privacy, creating ethical and responsible user experiences, and making sure our site and tools are accessible.
This is a follow-up article. Here’s the first piece, if you’d like to read that one as well
you’re still traceable because every phone CPU is directly associated with it’s IMEI. Although that’s probably not an issue for you since you’re planning on using banking apps anyway.
But is that a problem for the threat model of banking as your bank logs everything you’re doing and will gladly share that with the government anyway. My question is is there any other possible data they could gather besides the VPN server’s IP address and what I’m doing with my bank?
You can change IMEI at will. IMEI doesn’t do shit.