Helium Mobile’s “free” phone service has a steep cost.
By Langston B. Lee
During my usual Monday commute on the unreliable G-train, something caught my eye. Not a subway performer, not a unique outfit—an ad promising free phone service from Helium Mobile.
Free! Even Helium admits: “We know. ‘Free’ is typically marketing speak for too good to be true.” And it is. Helium trades phone service for the right to track your every step. At your regular hangout spots with friends? Helium will be there. That awesome fusion restaurant you stumbled upon? Helium’s joining you for dinner. Doctor visits, political events, protests, church or temple: Helium’s keeping track of your life story and adding timestamps and precise location data.
If this sounds like stalking, that’s because it is. While you can opt out of location tracking with other carriers, Helium requires it as a condition of service. The ways that your location data can be weaponized are too many to count. Helium weakly promises to “anonymize” your data after 24 hours, and claims its data ‘can’t be reverse engineered to identify you,’ but that’s an old promise that’s been repeatedly debunked. “Anonymous” location data can easily be re-identified when you combine it with just a few bits of publicly available information. Most Americans can be uniquely identified just from their birthday, ZIP code, and gender. All of this information is easy to find and readily available on social media profiles and public records. Even if Helium keeps their promise not to sell your data today, yesterday’s re-identifiable location data is still worth a fortune to data brokers, law enforcement, and anyone else willing to pay for your digital footprint.
Helium offers incentives for users to sign up, but none of them are available until you’ve forked over 90 days of location data. Surveillance now, and rewards...maybe later? That’s an audacious ask from a company whose network owner recently agreed to pay a $200,000 fine to settle a securities fraud lawsuit.
Helium Mobile is shamelessly poisoning an essential service, a new low for surveillance capitalism. Companies have normalized a privacy tax on essential services. They dangle “free” services to customers in exchange for a comprehensive map of your most vulnerable moments that can be sold to the highest bidder: Your financial data for better banking service, your health data for insurance rates, your browsing habits for internet access. We know that when the product is free, your data is the product; but Helium isn’t even bothering to hide how they’ll profit from your personal information.
We’ve already seen how this plays out. Surveillance capitalism systematically targets our most vulnerable communities, turning sacred moments and private healthcare into intelligence products. Muslim Pro, a prayer app with over 98 million downloads sold location data to the U.S. Military. Users thought they were simply getting help with prayer times and finding Mecca’s direction. Instead, their most sacred moments became military intelligence. Every moment in our most vulnerable communities for sale. For a grand total of $160, anyone can buy a week’s worth of data showing who visited Planned Parenthood clinics.This surveillance spiderweb doesn’t stop there. It twists, stretches, and expands existing systems of discrimination. Helium claims they won’t sell user data, but so did countless other companies before lucrative partnerships changed their policies. Helium could easily become another tool in a system that treats Black and Brown communities as inherently suspect, especially when the financial incentive is massive. What makes Helium any different or more trustworthy?
The marketing strategy is misleading at best and predatory at its worst. Helium hopes we won’t read its fine print. And it advertises on the subway, where working New Yorkers who rely on public transit are already struggling with the cost of living. If you can’t afford rent and you can’t afford a reliable phone plan, then you probably can’t prioritize privacy tradeoffs found in the fine print. Privacy shouldn’t be a luxury that only those with disposable income can afford, and it shouldn’t come at the cost of your comprehensive digital profile.
Helium is offering a deceptive deal. Every New Yorker should think twice before signing on the dotted line.
Lee is a research intern at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) and policy advocate operating at the intersection of technology governance and civil rights.