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Exactly what he says. Just turn your phone off. If you are truly an enemy of the state, they have way more ways to find out where you are.Most proposals for smartphone contact tracing use bluetooth transmissions and GPS reception. Both would be blocked by an actual Faraday shield.
For 99.9999% of the population in a free country, just turning off the phone (not standby, OFF) is more than sufficient (The other 0.0001% are too paranoid/incapacitated/incarcerated to touch a smartphone). While turned off, the Bluetooth and GPS chips are provably inactive on factory hardware. Now, if you're the target of Mossad and suspect your phone has been tampered with, all bets are off.
Leaving the phone turned on in the bag is counterproductive, and also drains your battery very quickly as the phone will just keep trying (at full transmit power) to talk to cell towers. Only reason to do so would be if you want to fool your adversaries into thinking you are compliant with their "contact tracing" and just happen to spend all your time alone in poor-signal areas.
Assuming you downloaded and installed the covid app in the first place!You don’t even have to turn off your phone. Just go to the health app and turn off COVID tracking. The other tracking you see for movement is masked, they are looking at cellular movement they don’t specifically know it’s you.
Assuming you downloaded and installed the covid app in the first place!
You got me all paranoid - I just checked to make sure I don't have the app.
It's two parts -- system calls (APIs) in the next OS release for both platforms, and then a separate voluntarily (in most countries) downloaded app to use the new APIs to actually do tracing. No App, and Bluetooth disabled == no contact tracing.It’s not an app, it’s coming in 13.5 iOS and whatever Android next version is. It will push to you in the next couple days
Good point -- a foil coffee bag could be more effective than the cheap "signal blocker pouch" products sold on eBay/Amazon/etc.I have the "poor mans version" of a faraday bag, its a Cumby coffee bag. You know the one you buy there pre-ground coffee in. Works great as long as its folded up tight. But no calls or text can get threw and anytime I pull it out, I check the phone fast and its always "searching for a signal" till it finds it.
Back in the bag with the top folded over tight and its lights out for a signal, your mileage may vary.
I keep seeing this (off doesn't really mean off) claim made, never see any proof that this "feature" is in the stock firmware and unmodified (no physical changes inside the case) phone. To be effective for contact tracing, your phone would need to not only be passively listening for GPS and BTLE beacons, but also transmit a beacon of it's own (otherwise two or more people, carrying phones which are "playing dead", could meet and it wouldn't be logged).Sure a real faraday cage would work. But it will drain your battery while it searches for signal.
With the stuff that iOS and Android are baking in to the OS... we'll have to wait to see if there is anything baked in that would allow tracing to be done with the phone "off", since "off" may or may not mean everything is powered down.
Lucky me.It’s not an app, it’s coming in 13.5 iOS and whatever Android next version is. It will push to you in the next couple days
I have a Nokia flip phone with a removable battery. No apps and no internet. Am I finally king of the hill?
Not paranoid here, just a cheap bastard that wants nothing to do with the latest and greatest whiz bang doo-dad. Picked up a few spare batteries while I could still find them, gonna stick with it until I'm forced to get something else. The funny part is folks at work had never heard of it and thought it was something new and were crazy interested in it(especially with the live tiles that can be re-sized and it's leather back), a few even asked where they could get one.If you're a little more paranoid, you can buy one of the handful of phones that still offer a removable battery.
that'll work tooI thought I was just supposed to put the phone on my head, under my tinfoil hat.
NOW THIS IS FACISMSure a real faraday cage would work. But it will drain your battery while it searches for signal.
With the stuff that iOS and Android are baking in to the OS... we'll have to wait to see if there is anything baked in that would allow tracing to be done with the phone "off", since "off" may or may not mean everything is powered down.
Motorola rzr from 2006 hereAlmost.
10 year old Casio Milspec 3G flip-phone here.
Watch out baby, I got a 1MP camera!
The thing about "tower pings" is, that functionality is provably disabled in airplane mode, and has nothing to do with the way Apple+Google are implementing their contact tracing functionality. See my reply up on page 1 of this thread.I used to work as an RF tech and then RF engineer for a cellular company, but that was a lifetime ago. I can say with certainty that a cell phone needs to constantly ping a tower to ID itself and let the network know where it is. It does that so the network knows where to direct calls to at a physical cell phone tower and sector on the antenna array.
It's all supposition, which is just a few letters off for where Apple will expect you to put the next generation of iPhone.NOW THIS IS FACISMWith the stuff that iOS and Android are baking in to the OS... we'll have to wait to see if there is anything baked in that would allow tracing to be done with the phone "off", since "off" may or may not mean everything is powered down.
It is not on unless you have app(s) installed which have the capability of using the feature. If no such app is installed, the Settings switch for the feature is missing.iOS 13.5 with contact tracing was pushed to me last night. If you want it off you will have to change it, it defaults to on.