Privacy / 6 min read
Five eSIM privacy myths worth retiring
eSIM adoption has produced a steady supply of confident claims that do not survive contact with how the technology works. Some are marketing, some are forum folklore, and a few contain a grain of truth wrapped in a wrong conclusion.
These are the five that come up most often.
Myth one: eSIMs are more trackable than physical SIMs
The credential is the same. An eSIM holds the same operator identity and keys a plastic SIM does, and registers on the network in the same way. Nothing about the delivery mechanism adds tracking.
What people are reacting to is that an eSIM cannot be physically removed and swapped in seconds. That is a real operational difference, but it is about your control over the device, not about what the network observes.
Myth two: a VPN makes your SIM anonymous
A VPN encrypts destinations from the local network. It does nothing about the subscriber record that says who owns the SIM, and nothing about which tower you are attached to. Those are lower in the stack than the VPN operates.
The two are complementary. Anonymous credential plus VPN covers identity and destinations. Either one alone leaves a substantial gap.
Myth three: paying in bitcoin means the purchase is untraceable
The bitcoin ledger is public and permanent. If the coins came from an exchange that verified your identity, the path from that withdrawal to a merchant payment is often straightforward to reconstruct.
Bitcoin is still far better than a card, and Lightning better again, but untraceable is the wrong word. Monero is the one where the property holds by default.
Myth four: airplane mode makes you invisible
Airplane mode stops the radios, which does prevent network attachment while it is on. It is not a privacy strategy, because the moment you turn it off the device re-registers and the gap in the record is itself informative.
Powering down has the same property. Absence is a signal too, particularly when it correlates with something.
Myth five: no-KYC providers must be dodgy
Prepaid, anonymous purchase of a service is the normal historical default. Cash bought anything for centuries without a compliance department, and prepaid phone credit worked exactly this way before registration laws arrived.
The demand for anonymous connectivity comes overwhelmingly from ordinary people who dislike surveillance, journalists working in hostile environments and travellers who resent the paperwork. Treating that demand as inherently suspicious says more about how normalised identity collection has become than about the people buying.