Safeguarding your phone from potential tracking or hacking attempts is crucial in today's digital age. By simply placing it within a Faraday pouch, you can effectively disappear from the digital radar, ensuring your privacy and security signal jammer.
ALBERT EINSTEIN KEPT a portrait of the 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday on his wall, alongside a picture of Isaac Newton. Genius recognizes genius: Faraday's many discoveries led to electric motors, to electricity being put to practical use in technology, and to the concept of electromagnetic fields in physics. Faraday also figured out that an enclosure made of a mesh of conductive metal can absorb and redistribute electromagnetic interference. It is this work that's honored every time someone slips a cell phone into a pouch coated with metal, made for the specific purpose of preventing signals from getting in or out. The low-tech hack shields phones from digital buttinskies by blocking cellular signals, Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC, RFID, and Bluetooth. Privacy-craving citizens can put their phone into a Faraday pouch like this, where a metal lining renders the device inside invisible to snoops. “The biggest threat is a law enforcement agency using the signals on your phone to prove you were at a protest or demonstration that they decide later is illegal, and using that information to arrest you,” says Cooper Quintin, a security researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. He doesn’t believe a Faraday cage would protect a phone any better than turning it off or putting it into airplane mode, but says the cage’s advantage is that it’s harder to forget or screw up. If you know you're the forgetful type, though, or just don't trust airplane mode on your phone, a Faraday cage means your vanishing act is in the bag portable jammer.
