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We’ve covered Helium Mobile a few times since the launch of their free plan early this year, including a full review. The idea was simple: offer a cell phone plan with 3GB of data, 100 talk minutes, and 300 SMS texts per month on the T-Mobile network (and dedicated Helium hotspots around the country) for the whopping price of $0.
There was a catch, though. To get a price of $0 per month, you had to keep location data permanently enabled for the Helium app. That restriction, though, is now no longer required.
As of October 1st, Helium Mobile’s Zero plan no longer requires location sharing. The company has now shifted from requiring location data to simply requiring any data use at all on the plan per month.
Originally, Helium Mobile says they used the anonymized location data from the free plan users to learn “how and where the Helium network was being used” in order to work on improving their native coverage. Now, the company says they have enough data to no longer require that location data, and instead rely on data usage to measure demand.
The required location data sharing, even though it was fully anonymized, was a big sticking point for many prospective customers. Now that the requirement is gone, Helium is likely to snag more customers that might be a bit more privacy conscious.
Even better, for existing customers, Helium is automatically disabling location tracking in their app beginning with version 3.13.1. It’s rare to see a company proactively toggling privacy features for customers that actually improves privacy instead of reducing it.
If you’re interested in the Helium Mobile free Zero plan (which doesn’t even need a credit card!), or one of their higher-data plans that start at $15/mo, you can sign up via the Helium Mobile app using the links below.
