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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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100% unrelated, Anyone know if Faraday bag for phone is a good option for large gatherings where i uhh... just want to be part of the moment?
Bring an old fashioned digital camera and leave the phone at home
try a Faraday bucket instead.
If you really can't bear to be without a phone, get 2 burners. Put the number of each on the other. Nothing else. Bring one, and give the other to the person who might need you urgently or might be able to bail you out. You can write their burner number on yourself for EMTs to call, without giving police any justification for getting into their real phone.
Hmm seems like the concern is more police going through your phone if they grab you for some reason more than location. That make sense.
I've tested some and they work good if properly wrapped shut, but probably better for day-to-day use and less for such an event where you'd probably be best just to leave it home. Phones use radio frequencies from 14MHz (NFC) to 39GHz (5G mmWave) with spec up to 71GHz. It is real hard to get a radio wave blocker bag that can block almost every conceivable frequency band in the RF spectrum.
It is also hard to truly turn phones off anymore, many broadcast Bluetooth beacons when powered off, and even outside of that, they leave dead-reckoning tracking turned on that can extrapolate where you may have gone just by how you walk. It is also why a phone turned off can still have a dead battery in a month or two, because stuff is kept running, when older phones truly turned off and you could pick it up a year later and still have a charge.
EE here - a well sealed foil pouch should work just fine for basically all RF radiation. Even at a few MHz a piece of heavy duty aluminum foil has like 150dB of attenuation, and that goes up to basically infinity above 1GHz.
Yea just use your trusty hat
If you don't want to be tracked down afterwards based on your phone's location, turning it off will suffice.
If you fear to get arrested, you should just leave it at home or somewhere it cannot be found too easily.
And if you do take it along, set your lock screen to a pin, not a fingerprint. There are still some legal protections left (for now), and police can make you unlock a fingerprint but not a pin. I know, it's silly, but that's how it works.
You need the phone turned off, and the offline Bluetooth most phones these days broadcast also disabled. The NFC could also passively respond, although that would require more clever engineering to make a directional NFC scanner. ISO 15693 apparently extends the NFC distance to 3 feet.
Tell me why airplane mode isn't good enough.
Don't know, but that's kind of the point. Even "off is off" isn't entirely true anymore. So I just don't know what airplane mode exactly does.
Try wrapping it in aluminum foil. You can test to see if it works by trying to call your phone from another phone while it's wrapped up.
Came to say this. Tinfoil wrapping should work to keep your phone isolated.
So does, you know, airplane mode
Airplane mode is a software shutoff system. We want hardware shutoff system.
I don't know your threat model, but if airplane mode is not enough, then I wouldn't trust wrapping it in tinfoil either, as that would be less reliable. There are of course better ways than both of these methods. Like leaving your phone home.
No, in fact airplane mode often keeps Bluetooth and WiFi powered up until manually disabled, depending on the phone model, sometimes other radios as well. It also keeps GPS on so the phone can still track where it goes while in airplane mode.
I've never had a phone that keeps Bluetooth or Wi-Fi on when enabling airplane mode, but sure, if yours does that then of course also disable them separately.
Airplane mode is supposed to stop any radio transmission from your device. GPS does not transmit anything, so there is no reason to disable it.
Airplane mode can be used at the same time as airplane-provided Wi-Fi.
Yes, what's your point? Airplane mode turns off the cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. You can then turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth back on if you choose to, which only leaves the cellular network disabled.
I see, I misread your first sentence in the other comment.
You can't just turn it off?
Off isn't off anymore, unfortunately.
Pull the battery out?
If you can find one with a removable battery.
Sure just bring the tools to remove the glass and split the sealed phone.
I just upgraded to a Pixel 6 from Galaxy S8. The Galaxy had a panel that could easily be popped off. I realize this new phone does not. My bad.
On one hand the waterproofing is nice, but the literal black box nature is a problem.
They could make (and have made) waterproof phones with removable batteries. Greed and lack of regulation keeps modern phones sealed.
Well yeah, how else could they sell you a new phone every year or two if the one component that degrades over time could be easily replaced?
It was shocking how well my phone works after putting lineage OS on it, my pixel 3 runs better then my sisters pixel 7 now. If it was not for the battery I would likely be able to run on this hardware for a much longer time. And even with it all sealed up it will be cheaper and better for me to buy more "old" phones when the battery goes out then replace the battery.
So. I have had some recent experiences that have been....... Very educational about a lot of the less thought aspects of technology that most people take for granted. H Most faraday bags you can buy are fucking garbage. None of them hurt in the grand scheme of things but they more involved this but I can't do calculus so feel free to do the math). At around the 5 and 6 ghz range (guess what frequency wifi 6 and 5g operate at?) the gap size in a faraday cage needs to be something like 1-2mm.
Of course you're not talking about a farDy cage, but a shielded bag. So buy one, close it with the Velcro clasp, and ask yourself: how snug is sealed Velcro? How much can I roll this up? And all the other myrad questions that lead to the same fucking conclusion: this is not the radio blocking solution you thought it was.
This isn't to say you can't buy a faraday bag that works (even if it does you may need more than one) it's that as the frequency it gets increasingly difficult to block the signals coming in and out.
And I don't understand the math, at all, but I'm not sure how the power of a signal would effect a faraday bag. Like.im assuming it would but.
Anyway..my point is: if you're bringing a faraday make very, very, very,VERY fucking sure it actually works.
How do you do that? I'm not 100% be t I'm pretty sure the equipment needed is complicated and expwnaive.
Someone more knowledgeable can expand on any of this, . Since everything I've learned on the subject has been severely limited by the fact that the Internet is a fucking wasteland.
You gonna wrap your car too?
Bike or train? I hope car doesnt have tracker in it.