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 😅
I have a bag from silent pocket. Works great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
De Google your phone if your that paranoid. Switch to Apple if unable to degoogle phone.
It can’t be degoogled without gettung stuck in a boot loop.
surely it would be more cost effective to buy a degoogled phone and sell your current one?
Then yeah, faraday bag will suit your use case :)
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.
That certainly is cost prohibitive. Is it because of the frequency range of cell and wifi?
Also, thanks. I still might get one.
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.
I think it’s mostly about durability and great conductivity all along the closure.
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?
LOL Have you tried to find a phone with a removable battery lately?
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.
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.
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.
Are you trying to EMP-proof your phone, or block signals/tracking for a time?
I just want it to not be tracked constantly.
Only while you’re using it?
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.
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
Okay. That means I need to chexk the surplus stores. Maybe I will get lucky.
I don’t think that if real Faraday bags meant for military work they are avaible in surplus store for civilians
This is not bleeding edge tech.
I know but don’t think you could find them there. The only way of getting good ones is surely to buy some that seems reputable (aka not amazon shit) and test them in labs (maybe someone already done that and that Faraday bags recommandations exist online)
You can always test, try calling your phone in different bags
When talking about real and useful bags I’m talking about those that are blocking almost all the frequencies. Putting a device in a Faraday bag means that it’s not safe at first so it should be able to block all frequencies not only “call frequencies”
Faraday bags pass through all frequencies smaller then the holes in the conductor.
If you want total blocking of all frequencies you need a solid conductive surface, i.e. a block of metal, or a bucket of ionized water.
So yeah, whatever you got, you need to test with the transceivers on the device.
But military grade is just gear porn marketing term, you can make a gaussian surface out of house hold aluminum foil for Pete’s sake.
military grade
lowest bidder
If you wrap your phone in aluminum foil that should block everything right?
sure, as long as there were no holes at all.
Cell phone frequencies are 2-20 inches so you could have one inch holes with no issue.
Thanks for the explanation
I wonder if I could somehow manage to whip up an experiment using the spectrum analyzer on my flipper zero. I would have to push the button while it is in the bag.
You would need two flipper zero, one outside emitting on several frequencies and one inside trying to catch any frequencies from the outside one
SLNT Faraday stuff is supposed to be good. I’ve never used one. Michael Bazzell recommends them.
They work good, phone lost all connectivity inside. So does Mission Darkness.
Does a microwave work?
Does a microwave work?
