From hostile foreign powers using “unrestricted warfare” to basic privacy concerns, here are a few current valid reasons why Faraday Bag’s could start becoming more common. If you’re new to what a Faraday bag is, it’s a bag you can put your phone or other electronic device in to cut off any signals like cell, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. You might have seen them in movies and they are used regularly by the military & other agencies.
1. Privacy from hostile foreign powers (like…ahem….China)
There is a report circulating on how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been illegally spying on American citizens “of interest” via their phones from the Caribbean. In my opinion, this alone is disturbing enough to warrant using one but there’s more…
There’s also all the controversy on how the social media apps TikTok and WeChat are intrusive on user’s privacy (these apps are run by Chinese companies). And if the CCP spies on Americans illegally already then why wouldn’t they use other means like TikTok & WeChat to do the same thing? In Communist China there basically is not any separation of companies from the government so companies can play all sorts of roles beyond simply doing business. (This can actually also apply to Chinese citizens but that’s a whole other topic)
There is a tech expert who reverse engineered TikTok and concluded that it’s a highly intrusive tracking app vaguely disguised as a video sharing platform.
While not quite related directly to phones here’s another example that shows how valuable collecting data on people is for the CCP and the methods they are using. On Dec 21st 2020 Chad E. Wolf from the US Department of Homeland Security mentioned during a talk that TVs from a Chinese brand were secretly collecting info on the users and sending it back to China.
2. Big Tech’s ties with the CCP
Big tech companies including but not limited to Google, Facebook, Twitter etc… If you have one of their apps on your phone you are probably aware that they are collecting info about you and what you do. A lot of people have experienced suspiciously seeing an ad on Facebook shortly after they were talking about something within earshot of their phone. While these apps aren’t quite as intrusive as the Chinese apps they are still intrusive enough to make it uncomfortable to learn about the details. Mistrust in these companies has been growing and their links to the CCP are no secret. For example Dr. Fei-Fei Li who is currently on the company board at Twitter and who used to also work for Google has many links to CCP backed companies and is known to be pro CCP.
Also, many people are aware of how close Google and Apple work with the CCP and kowtow to their requests regularly. They also seem to be deceptive about it which raises even more concerns.
3. Misuse of COVID trackers
COVID 19 tracking apps are out there and have the potential of being abused and misused. I won’t go into too much detail on the possibilities or worse case scenarios with the present situations around the world and will leave that to your imagination. However, to get the wheels turning, just imagine if someone like Stalin in the former communist Soviet Union had access to the kind of technology we have today to track people via their phones. Say they took advantage of a crisis like a pandemic and in the name of “safety” required everyone to use an app to trace a possible virus exposer (sound familiar?). Now, sure this could help the situation; however, while it helps it could also simultaneously be used as a tool to target (for example) people they deem “threats” to their 1 party communist system, etc…. Then under this guise, these people could show up as coming into contact with the virus and be hauled off to their designated quarantine zones…I think you get the idea.
4. Check out this talk by Edward Snowden giving a rundown on how our phones spy on us.
