52
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top new old
[-] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago

Aluminum foil works. At least, I can't receive calls or texts through it last I tried.

Get the heavy duty kind. It's not any more conductive, but is more durable against tearing.

Note that a gap in your phone's tracking data can look suspicious at times. Sometimes it's less suspicious to leave your phone at home.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Just want to note here that suspicion does not equal proof. Consider honestly what you are trying to accomplish, and what the risks are. There are absolutely scenarios in which even raising suspicion is unacceptable, and others where it isn't.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

I'm not selling dope, I just don't need Google knowing everywhere I went on the way to the doctor's office, where I'll probably sit and look at cat videos in the waiting room. I have anxiety and I can't stand surveillance like this constantly.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Have you tried risk management instead? You can turn off your cellular network, wifi network, and Bluetooth. Hell, you can just toggle on air plane mode. This should theoretically turn off GPS too.

If this isn’t enough management then you’re suspecting that the OS is somehow keeping track of you or there’s some firmware that is bypassing OS controls to track you. Unless you are doing something highly illegal or you are someone highly important, I highly doubt this is the case.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Last I checked airplane mode does not disable GPS as it is a passive service. The phone will track your movement and then send it all next time you connect.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

De Google your phone if your that paranoid. Switch to Apple if unable to degoogle phone.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Hahaha what? "Give THIS company all your information instead" is kinda...

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Then yeah, faraday bag will suit your use case :)

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It’s not any more conductive

quick note: you're likely correct the conductivity may not be higher, but the conductance likely is.

in other words, i second your suggestion of heavier duty foil (for EM reasons, skin effect etc) alongside the mechanical factors you mentioned.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I second this. I've seen videos of cell phone thieves getting caught and they all have rolls of aluminum foil on them. I trust they know how to effectively block wireless signals.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Getting caught? Can’t work that well then!

jk

[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago

Using a few anti-static bags inside one another doesn't block 100% of signals but it cuts range down by a lot. But also, if you're looking for this high of a security level, wouldn't it be easier to just find a phone with a removable battery?

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

LOL Have you tried to find a phone with a removable battery lately?

[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Bags don’t really work, but hard shell boxes do.

Back when I was working with radio devices, we needed real isolation on lab benches, along with the ability to selectively allow RF paths with specific impedance. The gold standard was Ramsey test equipment enclosures, and they really work (although they only provide isolation up to about 90 dB at the frequencies we cared about; for extreme isolation sometimes we had to nest two like Matryoshka dolls).

It doesn’t sound like you need any conducted signal, just isolation, so that will make for a cheaper bulkhead. Here’s the smallest/cheapest Ramsey enclosure. You can probably find used ones on ebay for less, but you may need to hunt for a while.

Another company that makes real enclosures is ETS Lindgren but they’re larger and much more expensive.

If you don’t like the weight/bulk/cost of that solution, then no, you’re not going to find something that actually works.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That certainly is cost prohibitive. Is it because of the frequency range of cell and wifi?

Also, thanks. I still might get one.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I have a little more time now to write more. A Faraday cage needs to fully enclose an object with electrical conductivity in all directions. Solid metal is best, but holes are fine as long as they are substantially smaller than the RF wavelength you’re trying to block.

WiFi has wavelengths between 5 and 13 cm (speed of light divided by frequency). Microwave ovens are also around 12 cm and you can see the small holes in the screen you can see in the glass through the door. “Substantially smaller” than 12 cm, at least by an order of magnitude (10x), but approaching 2 orders (100x), around 1 mm.

5G is a bit all over the place, so let’s stick with wifi.

What matters is the size of the holes in your mesh, the type and thickness of metal, and the quality of the electrical contact across all seams. No gaps bigger than a half millimeter (based on 1/10th the wavelength, or maybe no gaps under 0.05 mm), anywhere. Bags have sewn seams and could spend a little or a lot of effort making it be conductive. Conductivity isn’t a normal sewing consideration and doing it well costs more. Then there’s the access hatch.

In an Anechoic chamber, the door has very good copper (and possibly gold plated, I don’t recall) connections all around a solid door on a big hinge with a big handle that cam-locks everything tightly. Obviously that’s really expensive, but it scales down from there. A good mesh bag folds the lip over on itself, but its still going to be poorly electrically connected at a micro level, especially with dirty durable metals.

You’ll open and close it a lot and it will definitely flex and get dirty, so I expect it to get worse over time.

The seam on a Ramsey box is a U-shaped aluminum channel on the bottom, containing conductive foam covered in a flexible wire mesh layer that gets compressed against the top aluminum edge in the middle. All of the aluminum edges are raw for electrical connectivity, while the outer shell of the aluminum box is coated to make it durable and easy to handle. There’s a decent latch to put a lot of force into holding it closed and compressing that foam tightly. It wears out over time. There’s a lot of work that goes into making that $600 box perform really well.

I’m sure you could find a bag that works half decently, but it will be pretty expensive and it will get worse over time. I’ve handled an evidence bag designed to keep devices isolated in transit. It looked decent, but I didn’t test it. Maybe you can find one of those but I bet it’s not from Bezos.

I kinda disagree with your overall plan being the best response to pervasive corporate and government surveillance, but you should at least be empowered with a scientific basis to evaluate a solution so I hope that helps.

Science Fucking Matters.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

First off, there's 200 more practical things you can do first. A Faraday bag isn't going to accomplish more long term then your phone simply being stripped of bloat and tracking apps, or simply being turned off.

That being said, if you must, Mission Darkness bags are decent, and I've tested them and they do block WiFi, BT, and cellular signals.

YMMV, and understand that when you phone is in the bag, it might as well be turned off. You can't access it without opening the bag.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I also vouch for mission darkness. Well made. I have a work iPhone that I keep in blackout when I am off. No signals have gotten through and the apple tracking feature is also null.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Are you trying to EMP-proof your phone, or block signals/tracking for a time?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I just want it to not be tracked constantly.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Only while you're using it?

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I don't think I am the target audience for these products, and have no answers for you, but am curious what these would do above what turning the device off. Is a device that is powered off still reachable? Or is this not about that?

Anyway, on to the non answers, when i worked around wiring that needed to not be affected by interference from adjacent wiring, it would we shielded by aluminum. It was thicker than household foil, and had braiding. The wires could be run with other, non shielded wires, most of which were dramatically different voltages.

I am not a scientist 😅

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Lots of devices still communicate when “powered off”.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Rather than going down the rabbit hole of faraday bags, why not gain a better understanding of how you are being tracked every day so you can take steps to alleviate your concern?

Elsewhere you said you don’t want to be tracked going to the doctors office, but if you drive there your cars license plate is being read by dozens of traffic cameras. If you walk or take a bus there are most likely cameras which are accessible to law enforcement that can be used for computer vision if they don’t already do so automatically.

In the event that you drove, it’s likely that your cars wheel mounted sensors are emitting unique rf signals even if it’s infotainment system doesn’t have immediate connectivity (it definitely does and is tracking and reporting unique ids of devices near it).

The places you went before the doctors office are selling your purchase history (that’s why they give you a deal when you enter your phone number at checkout!), your voter registration information is freely available to any group that can register a political organization and if you paid property taxes then those records are publicly accessible and searchable.

WiFi can even be used, experimentally at this point, to pinpoint the physical location of people in a room based only on how their bodies interfere with the high frequency signal.

The point of this post is not to send you into a panic but to help broaden the scope of stuff you’re considering and maybe help you come to a more complete solution.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

There is no opting out. We are in a nightmare. It has onlt started to bother me now that I have made a serious effort to address it, and I have failed miserably. My car is old so no worries there. But the google services and Gemini/Galaxy AIs on my phone piss me off. I can remove them, but get stuck in a bootloop and my phone will not work.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

My honest advice if you are concerned about the phone is to switch to ios, turn on automatic updates, turn on adp, turn on lockdown, do the privacy checkup wizard, install a doh/dot device management profile, setup a vpn you trust, either use a device management profile to implement it or that VPNs app if you trust the app and fastidiously go through the settings to improve your privacy further.

From that baseline you can build behaviors like always deleting web data and rotating device identifiers that can help you.

There are two reasons I make this recommendation: first, my goal is not perfect anonymity and privacy, but instead best effort. Im not choosing best effort, but instead recognizing that it’s all that’s within my ability. The best effort within my resources is using the hardware and software made by the company selling security along with careful configuration of settings to refine that.

The second is that my personal threat model is based on the police and recognizes that I am on tax records, voter rolls and many other public records. I am recognizable in my community and cannot “disappear”.

If you wanna make good choices for yourself, I’d recommend doing a foia request or whatever your governments equivalent is on yourself, purchasing yourself on some data brokers websites and going from there.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

SLNT Faraday stuff is supposed to be good. I've never used one. Michael Bazzell recommends them.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago
load more comments (7 replies)
[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

They work good, phone lost all connectivity inside. So does Mission Darkness.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I have a bag from silent pocket. Works great.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

From what I heard you won't find a real Faraday bag that works well and blocks almost all signals, those found on Amazon are really not that effective and only "military grade" bags could be useful in these kind of threats

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Okay. That means I need to chexk the surplus stores. Maybe I will get lucky.

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

You can always test, try calling your phone in different bags

load more comments (9 replies)
[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Does a microwave work?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Something meant to maintain a high or low temperature. A Thermos or pizza delivery bag or a bag for bringing frozen groceries home. Some might just be foam, but there are also ones with metalic coating or a steel shell.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

i made one with tinfoil and a ziploc bag

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
52 points (93.3% liked)

Privacy

41894 readers
867 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS