At Cape, your privacy is our top priority. We are dedicated to minimizing the data we collect and store, particularly sensitive information like your payment details. To ensure your financial data remains secure, inaccessible to unauthorized parties (and to us), and decoupled from your mobile activities, we use tokenization through Stripe, a trusted global payment service provider.
What Is Tokenization?
Tokenization is a process that replaces sensitive data, such as your credit card number, with a unique identifier known as a token. This token is a randomized string of characters that has no meaningful value outside of its specific transaction context. Importantly, the token cannot be used to retrieve your actual credit card number or other sensitive information, making it useless to anyone who might intercept it.
Imagine you have handed in your coat at a coat check, and you receive a claim ticket. This ticket is a stand-in for your coat—it’s useful only to retrieve your specific coat. If someone steals your wallet with the coat check ticket, the ticket itself is meaningless to the thief as it lacks information about what the stub represents, and how and where to redeem it. This is the essence of tokenization—your valuable information is replaced with a token that can only be used in the specific context of its intended purpose.
How Tokenization Works at Cape
When you sign up for Cape and provide your payment information, we don’t ask for your name or address (because we’re committed to data minimization), and we don’t store your full credit (or other payment) card number or expiry in our systems. Instead, we use Stripe’s tokenization process and intentionally split customer data between our payment gateway and Cape’s internal business systems. Here’s how it works:
- Stripe SDK Integration: We use Stripe’s Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) to handle all payment-related processes. This integration ensures that Cape’s systems never directly handle, store, or access your sensitive payment information. Instead, the SDK facilitates the secure transmission of your credit card details directly to Stripe.
- Token Creation: When you enter your credit card details during the payment process, Stripe generates a token to represent your card information.
- Payment Processing: Cape uses the token generated by Stripe to initiate transactions, whether for a one-time payment or recurring monthly charges. The actual credit card information never passes through Cape’s servers, and we don’t have access to it at any point. All we can ever see from our side is the type of credit card (e.g., Visa, Mastercard) and the last four digits of the card number, which helps us identify your payment method without compromising your full financial details.
- Data Disaggregation: Your payment data is disaggregated, meaning that the sensitive components are not stored together in a single location. Stripe handles the actual card details, while Cape only receives the token, which cannot be mapped to your real credit card number.
- Security and Compliance: Stripe, as our payment processor, complies with the highest industry standards, including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) Level 1. This ensures that your payment data is handled with the utmost security, both during and after transactions.
Why Tokenization Matters for Your Security
Using tokenization means that even in the event of a data breach at Cape, your credit card information remains secure with Stripe, who is in the business of securing financial transactions, and it’s inaccessible to us so your payment method can’t be correlated with the rest of your mobile activity. We add another layer of privacy by not collecting your name or address to process payments, ensuring that your personal details are not stored in conjunction with your payment information.
With Cape, you can have the peace of mind that your financial data is disaggregated and kept safe from unauthorized access.
We’re not just another telco—we’re building a service with security and privacy at its core. Join us in the movement for connectivity without compromise, and switch your cellular service to Cape today.
