• Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz
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    9 months ago

    Why shouldn’t you bring your phone?

    Edit for y’all who thought I don’t know what cell triangulation and gps tracking are: If you’re involved in protesting to the extent that you might be actively tracked, you should have the proper precautions in place on your phone that make it untraceable even when you’re carrying it with you.

    Edit 2: “Proper precautions” includes using GrapheneOS with 2 SIMs. Only use one of those SIMs at protests and make sure to never use them at the same time. If the government is tracking you past that point, why do you even have a phone in the first place?

    • Wermhatswormhat@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      That’s how the FBI has been able to positively identify where people were during the January 6th Insurrection. The FBI said shortly after the insurrection that if you had your phone with you, you would be caught.

    • midori@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Because it can place you at the location of the protest while it happens. Not very good for anonymity.

    • StringCheese@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Your phones manufacturer or carrier can be subpoenaed for the location, cops can seize it and identify and/or extract data from it, and IMSI catchers are often used at protests. If you need, you can buy a burner phone and prepaid sim just for the protest.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        If you need, you can buy a burner phone and prepaid sim just for the protest.

        But can you buy it without a credit card or debit card tied to your name? A lot of places around me have made it so you must have a traceable type of payment to be able to buy a pre-paid phone. They won’t let you pay for it in cash.

          • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            9 months ago

            Not sure, I haven’t tried that route. That seems like a simple workaround, however, so I suspect they probably don’t allow it with pre-paid cards but I could be wrong.

      • LoamImprovement@beehaw.org
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, like if you’re going to the trouble of getting a faraday bag or a lead lined case or whatever you think makes it untraceable… Just leave it at home? It’s a liability.

    • shoppingrat@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      there’s only two ways you are preventing carrier/google/apple signals coming out of a phone and giving yourself away:

      1. its something like a pinephone that has no google/apple services running and you have a physical toggle to turn off bluetooth, wifi, data

      2. a faraday bag

      • shoppingrat@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Govts and corpos will use bluetooth and wifi mac addresses to ID and track people. luckily more and more devices are shipped with wifi mac randomization.

    • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      your phone can’t work if your carrier doesn’t know where you are

      on top of that, advertisers put bluetooth receivers everywhere, which will log your phone as having been nearby, even if you don’t connect

      on top of that, you can do the same bluetooth trick with wifi endpoints

      plus your phone has a gps/glonass/whatever receiver in it

      probably other reasons too but those are the ones i can think of off the top of my head

      yes you can maybe mitigate all of these, but there are probably ones i haven’t thought of that people much smarter than me have, so why take the risk?

    • po-lina-ergi@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      To respond to your edit: no, you just shouldn’t bring your phone

      You can’t harden your phone against every hypothetical because you can’t think of every hypothetical and it’s dumb to think you can. Why would you think you alone can outsmart teams of very well-paid people who literally sit around all day thinking about ways to track you using your phone?

      Your phone literally can’t even have signal without your carrier knowing where you are, so why bother bringing it?

      • AVincentInSpace@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        Are you seriously here to tell me there are no uses for a cell phone without signal or Internet access, when the most common use for cell phones at protests is taking video?