Software-based devices like mobile phones, laptops, virtual assistants, GPS trackers, fitness trackers and sundry that have made our lives so much easier on a day-to-day basis also have a less-favorable side to them. These gadgets are integrated with microphones, cameras and various other kinds of sensors that enable them to pick up information from their environments. While that’s critical to their functioning, it also makes it quite impossible to turn them off entirely to the point that they stop transmitting any signals at all.
Things get trickier when devices have non-removable batteries which means they are potentially tracking your whereabouts even when turned off. As a result your privacy is compromised as long as you have one of these devices on or around you. But technology and privacy do not have to be mutually exclusive. That’s why there are Faraday bags for when you want to simply cut off from the network.
Matt Blaze offers his expert opinion on Faraday bags and which ones give you the most bang for your buck in his article Testing Phone-Size Faraday Bags. In his blog, Matt writes:
A Faraday cage severely attenuates radio signals going in or out of it. It can be used to assure that an untrustworthy device (like a cellphone) isn’t transmitting or receiving signals when it shouldn’t be. A Faraday cage is simple in principle: it’s just a solid conductive container that completely encloses the signal source, such that the RF voltage differential between any two points on the cage is always zero. But actually constructing one that works well in practice can be challenging. Any opening can create a junction that acts as an RF feed and dramatically reduces the effective attenuation.
Read the rest of his article titled Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags to find out how Faraday pouches work and what his recommendations are with regards to those.
