With the recent news regarding Google and Android, there could soon be no good options for mobile phones. And for many of us where Pixels are unavailable, we’re already out of good solutions. Therefore, how could we as users protect ourselves from the potentially compromised device as much as possible? Removing the microphones, sensors, etc. would be ideal but that’s unfortunately not practical.
I see that there are some portable soundproof enclosures that could be used while the phone is not in use to minimize its ability to snoop on conversations, but these tools weren’t built with this purpose in mind, would something like this be sufficient? In what other ways could the device snoop on me via its many sensors?
I assume that just like a ISP-provided router, it could be used as a “Wifi camera” as per this article? If so, I assume that there is no way to mitigate against this threat?
You’d have to test it yourself but in theory such a container should temporarily blind and deafen the phone. It’d be even better if you could combine that with a Faraday bag to block radio frequencies as it can still use radios for all sorts of things such as GPS tracking. There’s probably a lot more to this though so it depends how far you wanna go.