Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone
TheFriar@lemm.ee 6 months agoIt’s never a good idea to bring your phone with you. It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you. The BLM protests were just the tip of the iceberg. The apps you have on your phone track you. The government is buying that tracking data. Your phone is a massive privacy weak point. It’s basically a bug you carry on you willingly. It’s not safe. Period.
theconversation.com/police-surveillance-of-black-…
vox.com/…/police-law-enforcement-data-warrant
Leave your phone at home. It’s not worth it. It may not bite you in the ass the day of, but could very easily come back to haunt you after they investigate, in case anything goes “wrong” in their eyes. It’s just not worth it.
I think the fact that we are able to record everything that happens and automatically upload it seriously outweighs what you are saying.
The only reason cops get in trouble is only because people are filming. If it’s not caught on camera, it didn’t happen in the eyes of the law if it’s just our word against a cops.
It’s your life. This advice is important in more active circles. There are also jobs that should be given out. Just like there are medics that come out, there should be journalists—in leftist action circles, this isn’t EMTs and NBC photographers. See what I’m saying?
It’s ultimately your choice. But depending on what’s happening, the cause, the state, the cops, the current state of the govt of the country, etc., this advice can literally be invaluable.
For 200-250$ you can get very decent used compact cameras (like the RX 100). It won’t upload the photos immediatly, but it is still pretty much on par with most current cell phones.
It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
If you can’t take out the battery, it’s never actually off.
That’s not quite how it works, though. These devices are basically mini computers now, there’s a limit to what they can do without fully booting. Devices that are plugged into the wall might be likely to retain some power-draining function while plugged in, but there’s only so much you can do on a trickle charge while a phone is powered off.
They’re still running in low power mode and can wakeup from the network so they can absolutelly be made to “boot up” without turning the screen on and you being aware of it.
This is not like bloody PC were the lights turn on and you can hear the fans when the thing is going, it’s a machine with a low power mode which itself can already do a lot and which can be brought to a high power mode if needed without there being any visible or audible side-effects to alert the user.
Unless you completelly cut it off from power (by taking the battery out, which you can’t in most modern smartphones) that smartphone with the lights off, the screen of and making no sound can just as easilly be in low power mode waiting for you to press the On button as it can be in full power mode with a mobile network connection active, accessing the microphone and the GPS microchip and sending that data out, and it looks exactly the same from the outside.
let’s put aside everything !Aceticon@lemmy.world wrote you; if the French state was trying to legalize exactly this, it must be possible: la validation pure et simple de l’activation à distance des fonctions de géolocalisation de téléphone et autres objets connectés (voiture, balises airtag, montre etc) qui repose exactement sur le même procédé technique que le dispositif censuré : la compromission d’un périphérique, en y accédant directement ou par l’intermédiaire d’un logiciel espion pour en prendre le contrôle à distance.
Nothing in your links above indicate that the spyware operates while the phones are powered off (although I relied on a crappy translation of the French). Could spyware mock the shutdown process so that it looks like the phone is powered off while the phone is actually running? Sure it can, but the victim will be tipped off when the phone’s battery is being drained even while it is “shut off”. (And someone who is paranoid enough to shut down their phone would pay attention to that.) . It seems like it’s not worth the effort.
read, listen to people that were spied on using the pegasus software
easy to find
i don’t know if you’ve met any real activists, militants in your life but they’re rarely geeks. And checking the battery of their phone or reading about battery life isn’t one of their priorities
simplejack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
IMHO, as someone that works in security / privacy, I tend not to view it as a binary thing. It depends on where you live, what you’re protesting, what you look like, who you are, etc.
Are you in Russia or China and are protesting the government? Yeah, I might leave that thing at home. Are you a white lady in San Francisco marching with a pink knit cat hat during brunch hours, then you’re probably well on the other side of the risk spectrum. You might actually be introducing more risk by having less immediate access to communication or a camera.
IMHO, it’s nuanced.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The problem is that the people doing the surveillance are hardly going around honestly telling people what’s their surveillance profile.
For example the UK that “pink knit cat hat white lady” would very likely be under surveillance if she was a member of the Green Party and participated in demonstrations.
Also the lower the barrier to entry to surveillance the lower the “threat profile” needed end up in that dragnet: if the authorities already have well established and commonly used ways provided by ultra-broad surveillance court (or whatever those courts are in your country) orders to just get from the mobile network providers all the phone numbers that connect to specific cell towers during a specific time period, pink knit cat lady is going to end up in the list just as easilly as baclava-wearing hard-core anarchist looking to break stuff.
Asidonhopo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I agree with your point, but balaclava is the hat, baclava is the delicious Greek pastry.
merde@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Image
merde@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
what an image though 😁
simplejack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
We take on risk every time we decide to wake up and start the day.
I live in a place where I’m considerably more likely to get hit by a car while walking than thrown in jail as a political prisoner. That doesn’t mean I’m never going to go for a walk. I’m going to live life.
Leaving my phone at home seems pretty silly when the risk is very low in my nation and I do riskier things while cooking dinner.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Oh, in day to day usage I agree with you: we’re all one little uninsteresting datapoint in a whole lot of datapoints and there are plenty of other was in which we are tracked.
However if you’re part of a Political Party or Movement and/or attend demonstrations, it’s probably wiser to leave the phone at home, if only because that make you stand out as a much more interesting datapoint than average.