Written by: Dillon Kivo
Former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan told New York Weekly that he had assumed something about privacy that turned out to be untrue.
“I assumed people understood that ‘private’ doesn’t mean anonymous or untracked. Turns out most people think privacy settings are all off switches. They’re usually not. Go incognito, and your ISP, your network, and plenty of sites can still see exactly what you’re doing. Turn off location for one app and five others are still tracking you. Hand your number over for a pizza order or to sell a truck online, and it gets sold, and now you’re getting calls for the next ten years. Most ‘privacy’ settings are just a curtain; the tracking keeps happening, you just can’t see it. That gap is why we built Glacier.”
He is right on all three counts. Private browsing hides your history from you and almost nobody else. Turning off location for one app does nothing about the rest. And a phone number, once it is out, stays out.
The Glacier app was built for that gap. Ryan hosts the Shawn Ryan Show, one of the most widely followed interview podcasts in the country, and is named a co-founder of Glacier App in the company’s launch announcement, alongside Alex White, Glacier Security’s chief technology officer and a former NSA engineer.
Where the Tracking Actually Happens
The gap Ryan describes is not a single problem. It breaks into at least four, and they sit in different places.
The first is the network. Your phone announces itself every time it connects, and your carrier or the Wi-Fi owner can see that traffic.
The second is tracking. Ad networks and data brokers follow you across apps and websites, then stitch the pieces together.
The third is the platform. Instagram collects what you do inside Instagram no matter what your account settings say.
The fourth is storage. Anything already sent is sitting on a server somewhere, and no switch on your phone can reach it.
Glacier handles the first two.
What the Glacier App Does
The secure DNS is the main event. You toggle it on and leave it running, and it does the day to day work: stopping your phone from reaching known trackers, ad networks, and data collection services before any connection is made.
The VPN is a different tool for a different moment. It is built for short stretches in higher risk situations, an airport or hotel network, where you want a second layer between you and whoever else is on that connection. Not something you leave on all day.
Alongside those, the app sends alerts when your device or network looks risky, and watches for tampering, jailbreaking, and known monitoring tools.
Ryan uses his own phone as the example. By four one afternoon, he said, it had blocked more than 1,300 trackers, and that is with no social media apps installed. He assumes most people’s count runs higher.
The company says your data stays on your device. Glacier does not offer messaging, and it does not view your contacts or track which apps you use.
Glacier has shipped updates steadily since launch. Recent releases improved logging in, refined the dialer and call history, added support for larger text and zoom, and made the security status screen easier to read at a glance.
The base plan is $14.99 per month or $159.99 per year.
The Burner Number
The pizza order is the part most people recognize. Your phone number never changes, and every place you hand it over is a place it can leak.
“My favorite thing about the Glacier app is the burner number feature,” Ryan said. “This is like the real James Bond MI6 CIA level stuff.”
Glacier adds a second line inside the app. You choose the number, you hand that one out, and calls to it come through Glacier instead of your real line. The number on your phone bill never leaves your hands.
“You just deactivate the number,” he said. “You burn it. Gone. They have no way to contact you now. And then you just pick another one.”
The burner is not in the base plan. Plans with a number start at $19.98 a month and go up to $34.98 for five. Extra numbers cost $2.99 each.
Where the Blocking Stops
Inside a social app, the picture gets more complicated.
“We block what we can clearly identify as tracking without breaking the app,” said Alex White. “That covers a lot of obvious offenders. But some tracking is woven directly into how an app functions; the same address delivers your content and reports your activity, and blocking that would just break the app for you. So think of us as removing the tracking that’s separable, not promising zero tracking everywhere within social media apps.”
The same holds for advertising, where ads built into a YouTube video or an Instagram post still get through.
Storage is further out of reach. Glacier works on your connection and your phone line. It does not touch data already sent, so a deleted text sitting in a backup stays right where it is.
Security writer Matt Johnston made a related point in a review in late July. Intelligence work teaches a team what to prioritize, he wrote, but anything learned in a classified setting cannot be used commercially unless it is already public. “Intelligence-grade” is a marketing phrase. Nobody certifies it.
Where the Technology Came From
The app is new. The company is not.
Glacier Security started in 2015 in Annapolis Junction, Maryland, down the road from the National Security Agency. Its founders came out of US intelligence, and the company spent a decade building for government agencies and large corporations.
Those products were never meant for regular people. Guardian by Glacier is invitation-only and manages security policy across a customer’s entire fleet of phones. Another builds anonymized VPN networks for governments and executives, using an approach developed under a Department of Homeland Security program.
The consumer app is the first thing the company has sold to individuals.
“Glacier App was built around a simple question,” White said. “What if protecting your privacy didn’t require changing the way you use your phone?”
Why Ryan Signed On
Ryan came to Glacier with a problem money had not solved.
He contracted for the CIA in the Middle East, working against ISIS and the Taliban. Several intelligence services were operating in the same country at once, all collecting on each other. The phones his team carried were built for that. They were also miserable.
“Super complicated, not easy to use, very not user-friendly at all,” Ryan said.
Years later, the Shawn Ryan Show put him back in the same spot. The guest list had grown from former teammates to heads of state, and everyone those people knew had a way to reach him. So he went looking for the same hardware.
“I’m talking $10,000 plus for one phone,” he said.
Buying them for his team was one thing. Recommending a $10,000 phone to an audience of ordinary people was another.
“I wanted something that could protect everybody, not just people who can afford a $10,000 plus phone,” he said.
“Privacy isn’t optional,” Ryan said. “From my time in the Teams and at the CIA, it was part of the job. That’s why I partnered with Glacier. Real security, made accessible.”
The curtain he describes is real, and most people mistake it for a wall. What the subscription buys is smaller than the metaphor suggests. It covers your connection and your phone line. The platform and the backup stay exactly as they were.
