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How does FreedomPop make money?

latimes.com

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Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#41

Post by rotodos »

sweep4r wrote: post #12

FreedomPop in Spain was a free service until recently. It was completely unusable. They were selling Three (UK) cards that worked here in roaming. The internet service simply didn't work. They were assigning telephone numbers they borrowed from another company. That company didn't have a licence to lend their assigned numbers, that was illegal, so they had to stop providing their services and I suppose they'll get fi…

It seems the CNMC forbid their number provider (Parlem... previously known as FonYou) from reselling those numbers to be used as VoIP numbers, and FreedomPop took in a rush the route of porting everything to MasMovil and forcing you to buy new MasMovil 4G cards for 2€ shipping and port your Parlem number to them to keep your free service. And announced all of this on the middle of August when pretty much half of Spain is on holidays.

The advantage is that the new cards are pretty much plain Masmovil simcards, so calls and SMS go over GSM directly and 4G works at decent speed over the Orange network.

But if you look at the whiteboard behind the CEO on the picture on the article, they were intelligent enough to leave written on it things about their roadmap like "Blocking SMS" or "Masmovil = ?appnet? calls + SMS" which leads to think that they will migrate both to their app in the future.

At least they also have "holiday" written on the whiteboard, so probably they also thought about how bad of an idea is to do all of this on summer holidays.

Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#42

Post by tinus_hn »

etaty wrote: post #6

FreedomPop is operating on a scamming shady level by not being honest about what they are selling. They don't give you a real phone number, just some app you need to use to call. Avoid them. Edit: Is it how hacker news community is? downvoting because I tell the truth how their service is? I had the experience of getting charged for months without warning. They use your credit card, instead of direct debit in the UK…

Please don't complain about being downvoted

Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#43

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

tedmiston wrote: post #27

> FreedomPop pays Sprint and AT&T based on customer usage. The two big carriers can see what websites FreedomPop users are checking out, but neither they nor FreedomPop can record or monitor calls as long as only FreedomPop users are participants. I wonder if the major carriers track and log web browsing history of their own customers as well? And if we can opt out...

Yes & No (unless use TOR). To ask the question is to answer...they will do whatever they can get away with. Haven't you heard of the Snowden revelations?

Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#45

Post by samstave »

tedmiston wrote: post #27

> FreedomPop pays Sprint and AT&T based on customer usage. The two big carriers can see what websites FreedomPop users are checking out, but neither they nor FreedomPop can record or monitor calls as long as only FreedomPop users are participants. I wonder if the major carriers track and log web browsing history of their own customers as well? And if we can opt out...

Of course they can. Of course you cannot.

T-Mobile, for example even monitors and freaking blocks your usage to certain sites when on airplane mode and on wifi - even when you have wifi assist disabled.

Further, they even deduct from you data usage wifi use!

It's provable! I've proved it and T-Mobile Philippines call center says "oops let me reset your data plan" when called on it.

I proved it by only being in airplane mode and used wifi calling, and seeing that data was being deducted from my account when I wasn't using cell data.

Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#46

Post by eof »

freedom pop is sketchy AF. without clicking that link, based on my experience its: hiding fees, making it difficult to cancel service, not actually canceling service once the service has been canceled.

Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#48

Post by theEXTORTCIST »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #43
tedmiston wrote: post #27

> FreedomPop pays Sprint and AT&T based on customer usage. The two big carriers can see what websites FreedomPop users are checking out, but neither they nor FreedomPop can record or monitor calls as long as only FreedomPop users are participants. I wonder if the major carriers track and log web browsing history of their own customers as well? And if we can opt out...

Yes & No (unless use TOR). To ask the question is to answer...they will do whatever they can get away with. Haven't you heard of the Snowden revelations?

TOR does not protect DNS queries out of the box. You must configure your PC to query through TOR or all of your DNS queries have the potential to leak to your ISP

https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/8/how-does-tor-route...

Verizon has been adding headers for tracking for some time (probably via Blue Coat ProxySG forward proxy or similar technology) https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-he...

Re: How does FreedomPop make money?

#50

Post by rb808 »

throw7 wrote: post #30

Recently I looked into moving some family members onto cheaper plans. I did look at freedompop, but decided to try mintsim; freedompop seemed... "sketchy". But the problem was I ran into barriers for byop. The 1st phone was a verizon phone, which, while unlocked, they disabled access to configure APN settings. The second phone was a net10 android one phone. When I called them, they said they couldn't technically unlo…

thanks mintsim actually looks great. Aside from the $15 2GB/mo LTE, unlimited 2G is gold, is good enough for getting messages, email and traffic in navigation.
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