Restrict mtp / usb file sharing on android

Questions
1

Hi all,

I’ve been wondering for a while now if there exists a solution to restrict which files are available to be shared between an android phone and a computer.

I’ve stopped carrying a usb-stick after reducing my keyring and now simply uses the internal storage of my phone if I very rarely needs to transfer files.

Issue is, if I plug to a work compute, or a friend computer, they have access to all the files on my phone. Duh.

I mean, if I could only expose an empty folder to copy in files, or only expose 15 pictures / a picture folder to share files through USB, it would limit information to what is truly needed, protecting my private documents on the phone.

In the past, there was some solution for virtual CD drive in android, you could mount ISO and expose them to a PC as CDROM, booting of it. In the same idea, if you could create a small file of 500MiB and export this as a disk/partition, that might work too (but less easy for phone to computer sharing).

Is this a pipe dream ? :sweat_smile:

2

Not possible unfortunately. I guess you might need to carry a usb-c/usb-a key. Maybe you could transfer it via Bluetooth I am not sure (works between Android devices) but that would be slow.

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3

You can format the USB and fill one half of the storage with FAT32/NTFS/ExFAT filesystem.

The other half of the storage would be something like a LUKS or veracrypt encrypted volume.

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