Our Privacy Principles

Last Updated: August 18, 2026

Here is a short summary of our privacy practices. This summary is intended to be easy to read and understand. You can find our full Privacy Policy .

If you have concerns about these privacy principles, or you otherwise have comments, please, let us know. We are committed to maintaining user-first privacy principles, and that is a work always in progress. This is an ongoing conversation, and we want you in it.

Our goal is to minimize the information we collect from you, to purge it as fast as possible, and to minimize the extent to which it is shared, while still providing you with a good experience with our website and our products.

We will update this Privacy Policy often as we seek to provide more details and transparency. We will post these changes on our website, so you can always find the latest version. We might also send you notifications about Privacy Policy updates.

One thing that won’t change is our privacy principles, which underpin this Privacy Policy:

  1. Your data is a part of your person. You, and only you, should control it.
  2. We will collect the minimum amount of user data needed to offer our service.
  3. We will never sell your data. Period.
  4. We will comply with the law, but we can only share what we collect and store.
  5. We believe everyone should have access to a private, secure connection.


How do we collect your personal information?
We collect your personal information when you provide it to us on our website (for instance, when you enter your email address to join our mailing list), when we collect website usage information (for instance, your browser type) through your navigation of cape.co, or when you sign up for our cell phone service. As a principle, we do not track and link customer data captured across the Website with customer data captured from the Cape Mobile Carrier Service.

How do we use your personal information? We use your personal information to (i) make your phone service or the website work, including to manage our newsletter and allow you to sign up via email to receive Cape-related news, (ii) for administrative purposes such as to improve your phone service or our website’s performance or usability, (iii) to provide you with occasional updates about Cape, or (iv) otherwise only with your explicit informed consent.

If you voluntarily provide information via a survey, newsletter signup, or device purchase, the corresponding third party services that we use may collect the responses and contact information that you provide. This data is never tied to a specific user and is never linked to a phone service user account, because by principle we avoid combining your data. You can use a pseudonym and email alias, if you choose. These services also collect technical and usage data in accordance with their respective privacy policies.

To whom do we disclose your personal information?
We do not sell your personal information, period. We may disclose your personal information in the following ways: (i) with our service providers, to help us operate the website or our cell phone service, for instance by sharing information like your IP address with web hosting companies or sharing necessary information, like your phone number, with our network partners who help us connect you to subscribers of other carriers, (ii) to protect the safety, property, or rights of our company or of any third party (for instance, law enforcement authorities if we witness harmful behavior on our website or our cell phone service), (iii) to prevent or stop any illegal, unethical or legally actionable activity (for instance, if we notice deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity), (iv) to comply with our legal obligations, such as responding to legal or regulatory inquiries, and (v) in connection with an acquisition or sale of Cape, as permitted by law. This means if we get acquired, whatever information we have stored will become the property of our acquirer. The acquirer would be required by law to not treat your personal information in a manner that is materially inconsistent with the promises made in this Privacy Policy without providing you notice or obtaining your consent.

What about Law Enforcement and other Government Requests? As a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), Cape is required to comply with lawful requests for subscriber and other information from law enforcement and other government requestors, for example under the federal Stored Communications Act. As described in this summary, we seek to minimize the amount of personal information we collect and retain, and therefore can only provide limited information.

In addition, before making any disclosure, Cape will notify its subscribers whenever permissible of any legal process seeking disclosure related to their accounts, thereby giving you the opportunity to challenge that request. We will also challenge any such request that is not narrowly tailored or otherwise lawful. To date, Cape has not received any requests for subscriber data that contained a nondisclosure obligation.

In other words, while Cape respects the role of law enforcement in an organized society, we will take all reasonable measures to keep our subscribers informed and to protect them against overreach.

How long do we keep your personal information? We will keep it only as long as it is useful to provide you with cell phone service, or if you provided your email via our website, to send you updates until you unsubscribe. We prefer to delete data, not store it. We may keep personal information longer to comply with tax or legal obligations. Specifically, we keep zip codes to comply with tax reporting requirements.

We want you to know what information we collect and how long we keep it. We are always working to collect and store less information, for less time.

Data type

When collected

Connected to
user account?

Why is it collected
and how it is used

Retention by Cape

Network attach data

When your phone attaches to a network upon powering on, coming out of airplane mode, moving into coverage, upon rotating an IMSI, or crossing into a new network

Yes

To provide connectivity and to enable the feature

1 month

Name

Not collected

N/A

N/A

N/A

Street address

Not collected

N/A

N/A

N/A

Zip code

At payment

Yes

Required for Cape to pay state and municipal taxes, and for Stripe to process your payment

For tax reasons, we must keep zip code for 3 years

Phone number

At sign-up

Yes

Required for you to be able to make and receive voice calls, SMS, and MMS

If you are no longer a subscriber of Cape, we will not retain records of your phone number’s activity longer than 30 days.

Location - Time of Arrival (TOA)

When your phone connects to a cellular base station

No

Network management

Cape does not receive this data.

Location - Angle of Arrival (AOA)

When your phone connects to a cellular base station

No

Network management

Cape does not receive this data.

Observed Time Difference of Arrival (OTDOA)

When your phone connects to a cellular base station

No

Network management

Cape does not receive this data.

Location - GPS Coordinates

Only if you use e911 services.

Only if you use e911 services.

To locate you in the event of an emergency.

Cape does not receive this data.

Location - Cell ID (which identifies a geographic area of coverage provided by a network tower)

When your phone connects to the network

Yes

To ensure connectivity, and for billing reconciliation

Up to 30 days. For data sessions, our partners who help us connect to subscribers on other networks may keep this longer.

Location - Enhanced Cell ID (E-CID)

When your phone connects to a cellular base station

No

Network management

Cape does not receive this data.

Location - IP based

Never

N/A

N/A

N/A

IP address

When you call, text, or use data, or use Voice over WiFi

Yes

Fraud prevention, and to provide you with service

IP addresses in CDRs are deleted after a day (see “Call Detail Records” below).

IP addresses used as part of IMS registration for Voice over WiFi calling are kept for 7 days.

IP addresses associated with payment are kept for fraud prevention.

Call Detail Records (CDRs, also known as call logs)

When you send or receive a call or text, or when you use data

Yes

For billing, compliance, financial reconciliation, and spam call analysis and blocking

CDRs generated by Cape are . For data sessions, our partners who help us connect to subscribers on other networks may keep this longer.

Billing CDRs

When Cape’s MNO partners bill Cape for using their mobile network, they send evidence of network usage in the form of CDRs (TAP3, NRTRDE). Some partners use a data clearinghouse to share this supporting evidence, while others send the CDRs directly to Cape.

Yes

Detect and dispute bills from roaming partners.

30 days.

Browser history

Not collected

N/A

N/A

Egress data, including DNS queries, is not inspected by Cape (for example, via deep packet inspection of data flows)

Email

At sign-up, if you choose to sign up on our website. You can avoid providing email by signing up directly from the Cape app.

Yes

To email you your activation kit

None

Subscriber SIM number (IMSI)

At sign-up

Yes

Required to ensure connectivity across networks and billing reconciliation

If you are no longer a subscriber of Cape, we will not retain records of your phone number’s activity longer than 30 days. See CDRs

Device number (IMEI)

When your phone connects to the network

Yes

Our partners may capture this information to screen for stolen devices and fraud.

1-360 days. See CDRs

SMS/MMS

When you send an SMS or MMS

Yes

Undelivered messages are stored to reattempt delivery, and suspected spam messages are stored hashed and encrypted with the customer private key

7 days

Secondary number messages

When you send or receive messages using Secondary Numbers

Yes

To provide you with messaging service

Determined by subscriber

Voicemail

When someone leaves you a voicemail

Yes

To provide you with voicemail service

Upon port-out or 60 days after cancellation

MAC address (an identifier for your device)

When your phone connects to the network

Yes

Network security and management

Cape does not receive this data

Customer service communications

When you contact customer service with a question that requires us to troubleshoot your billing, onboarding, port-in or port-out, network issues, and other account-specific topics that you can’t resolve on your own within the app

Yes

To allow our customer support team to address account-specific issues that you can’t resolve on your own within the app

120 days

Cape Vendors That May Have Your Information
We also share information with network partners in order to connect you to subscribers of other carriers, and some of your information with the software vendors listed below to provide your customer experience.

Software Vendor

What we use it for

Data minimization steps we’ve taken

Vendor’s privacy policy

Mailchimp

Email CRM

Used to collect emails submitted by subscribers to our newsletter. No linkage to customer accounts.

Sentry

Error logging

Sensitive fields are redacted before event data is sent to Sentry in the event of an error. For example, the email you enter for the activation kit is redacted before reaching Sentry.

Stripe

Collect customer payments

Configured so that we do not see the full credit card number, and do not collect street address and other personal information such as name and email. See for more.

Mixpanel

Website analytics

We do not use third-party cookies. Only first-party cookies on the main website are leveraged to store UTM parameters for paid traffic only (30-day retention).

We only send conversion events on the website server-side and strip out browser info before sending back to the platform (i.e., full IP, device info etc.)

We also send conversion events server side to a few ad platforms (Google, Meta, Reddit, DDG) but strip out customer data prior to sending the event (not even hashed PII is sent back to improve delivery), and deliberately exclude sending purchase data back to these ad platforms (ad platforms do not know when a purchase occurs on website, no purchase data is sent back to the ad platform to improve ad delivery).

Zendesk

Customer support

Customer comments and tickets are deleted after 120 days, and any PII that is shared in a ticket is automatically redacted.