this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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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?
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.
Also worth noting that a fuck load of those mouth breathers kept their location on and were posting pictures and videos to Parler, which didn't bother to clear the EXIF or any metadata from user uploads.
Further, its doubtful most of them turn on things like MAC address randomization...
Isnt that on by default on androids at least?
Depends on the Android and what OS they are running, if they're using an older phone, it may not.
Fair nuff.
yes, but it is in a per-network basis instead of each time you connect
Because it can place you at the location of the protest while it happens. Not very good for anonymity.
Not if you use good opsec and turn on airplane mode.
Please elaborate
I highly doubt airplane mode actually does anything anymore. At the very least, do you really believe companies like Google would willingly give up collecting data just because you're in an airplane?
Thanks for pure spekulaation with no sources
And why would you be using Google services at all in this situation when GrapheneOS exists?
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.
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.
Could you use a $100 prepaid card like a Visa/Vanilla Wallet card?
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.
If you go with the burner phone, do not turn it on anywhere near your home. Preferably only at the protest location.
Also do not reuse it
there's only two ways you are preventing carrier/google/apple signals coming out of a phone and giving yourself away:
its something like a pinephone that has no google/apple services running and you have a physical toggle to turn off bluetooth, wifi, data
a faraday bag
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.
Triangulation
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?
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?
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?
Then bring a camera that can take videos?
are there dual sim pixels now?
Normal sim and Esim. You can have both at the same time iirc
Normal sim and Esim. You can have both at the same time iirc
Normal sim and Esim. You can have both at the same time iirc