Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California released a ruling that concluded state highway police were acting lawfully when they forcibly unlocked a suspect’s phone using their fingerprint.
You can turn that and Face ID off on iOS by mashing the power button 5 times- it locks everything down.
I’ve always wanted a setting to create a lockdown key and an unlock key. So something like middle-finger to unlock but index-finger to force it into PIN/password only mode. So you can have some convenience of a quick unlock but if an authority figure asks or forces you to unlock it you can one-tap lock it down.
In GrapheneOS, a single wrong fingerprint disables fingerprint unlock until the password is entered.
⚠️ WARNING: On android, mashing the power button 5 times calls emergency services…
There are two ways you can do this on Android currently, but they’re not as quick. You can try to unlock with the wrong finger 5 times and it will stop allowing fingerprint unlocks. Or, you can hold down the power button for 10 seconds and the phone will reboot and also disable fingerprint unlocking.
Not on my Pixel 6. 🤷♂️ It just does what I told it to do, namely to open the camera.
Edit: these are some Reddit down votes. I just didn’t know I had this feature, and I apparently have disabled it, but I don’t remember doing so. Oh well.
Cool, you disabled the gesture. Clearly the default SO setting doesn’t apply to you…
Have to tried? On my Samsung pressing twice does the camera (as I’ve set it to) but doing 5 times tries to call emergency services.
Android has a similar feature. It’s called “Lockdown mode” on the shutdown menu. Locks the phone and turns off any biometric unlocks.
Except it doesn’t activate by mashing the power button 5 times. On my Pixel 8, that activates the emergency dialer that will automatically call 911 if you don’t cancel the prompt in 5 seconds. I did not know that before. Probably a better use for that feature. It also points out the different ideologies of Apple vs Android.
My wife’s pixel 3(?) with a flaky power button had us wake up to cops knocking on the door because of that feature.
On my Pixel 7 Pro, I press the power and volume up buttons simultaneously, then I can click Lockdown. Now my passcode is required to unlock the phone.
In a getting pulled over situation, this works. But do it before you go protest anything. Or better yet, leave your phone at home. You don’t want to be reaching for something while a cop is pointing a gun at you and saying “Hands up!”
Not to mention it’s pretty regular to track who is participating by checking the towers in the zone all the people are participating.
That’s terrifying. So once we have tech to forcibly see inside the brain, that will be legal too?
Probably. Wouldn’t it be good to have the truth during investigations?
However I think that we really need refine when warrantless searches can occur. Right now many searches seem to be done with very little evidence to justify them. I think this protection should apply to your mind and phone just like it applies to your house. This probably also needs to be considered at border crossings. Right now they have basically unlimited rights for searching what you have on you with little to no evidence.
We should probably also rethink about how the information is shared when there is a warrant. Right now during a trial a huge amount of personal information can be made available. Maybe if it was easier to get precise information less would be needed.
Wouldn’t it be good to have the truth during investigations?
Well, yeah, but the mind is fallible. That’s why eye witness testimony usually only gets a case so far, people tend to forget specifics and fill in the gaps without realizing they did.
However I think that we really need refine when warrantless searches can occur. Right now many searches seem to be done with very little evidence to justify them. I think this protection should apply to your mind and phone just like it applies to your house. This probably also needs to be considered at border crossings. Right now they have basically unlimited rights for searching what you have on you with little to no evidence.
to be fair to the current justice system, a lot of times you can just hit the courts with “excuse me sir, this was unwarranted” and assuming it was actually unwarranted, they should overthrow it immediately.
Not if it comes with a level of invasiveness that is unforgivable it wouldn’t be.
Forcibly invading someone’s mind after they were convicted beyond reasonable doubt would make you a monster.
On Graphene/Calyx you can auto-restart the phone after a given time period if it hasn’t been interacted with. Recommend turning this on for all users.
Further advice regarding civil disobedience:
LEAVE YOUR PHONES AT HOME. Write down some numbers in case you get arrested—or better yet, memorize them. There are journalists there for documenting. And there will be plenty of other people that don’t follow this advice. Leave anything they could use as leverage over you and your cohorts away. Don’t bring ID. Don’t bring anything except what you need for the action. It’s not worth the risk.
ETA: also, any of you with a new car? DONT DRIVE THAT SHIT TO ANY MEETING OR PROTEST. They’re spying on you. Don’t post about it. Don’t use any unencrypted messaging service to coordinate it—WhatsApp is not safe. Signal and probably some other less common ones are the only ones safe enough. Ride a bike there, stash it in a conveniently hidden spot. Bring a change of clothes, plan escape routes, plant the change of clothes either hidden on your escape route or wear them under your plain clothes. Cover tattoos. Leftist activists are not safe. And literally the rest of your life could depend upon how well protected you have made yourself.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/10/felony-charges-pipeline-protesters-line-3
So many states have pretty quietly passed laws to make you a felon for protesting. Even peacefully. And to make you a fuckin corpse. In the south especially, a few states were writing “go ahead, run over any protester in the road” laws.
Be smart. Be safe. Have a plan. Have a contingency plan. This isn’t “fuck around with the blunt end of the justice system and find out” territory, in 2024 US, it’s time to be as safe as you can while doing what’s right. Because doing what’s right is criminalized. Heavily.
If you’re going somewhere where you think you might be at risk, IMHO, it’s probably just easier to turn your phone off. Android and iOS both require a non-biometric passcode after boot.
Or, if you want to keep your phone on, enable lockdown mode on Android, or tap power 5 times on iOS to require a non-biometric password at the next unlock.
It’s never a good idea to bring your phone with you. It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you. The BLM protests were just the tip of the iceberg. The apps you have on your phone track you. The government is buying that tracking data. Your phone is a massive privacy weak point. It’s basically a bug you carry on you willingly. It’s not safe. Period.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22565926/police-law-enforcement-data-warrant
Leave your phone at home. It’s not worth it. It may not bite you in the ass the day of, but could very easily come back to haunt you after they investigate, in case anything goes “wrong” in their eyes. It’s just not worth it.
IMHO, as someone that works in security / privacy, I tend not to view it as a binary thing. It depends on where you live, what you’re protesting, what you look like, who you are, etc.
Are you in Russia or China and are protesting the government? Yeah, I might leave that thing at home. Are you a white lady in San Francisco marching with a pink knit cat hat during brunch hours, then you’re probably well on the other side of the risk spectrum. You might actually be introducing more risk by having less immediate access to communication or a camera.
IMHO, it’s nuanced.
I think the fact that we are able to record everything that happens and automatically upload it seriously outweighs what you are saying.
The only reason cops get in trouble is only because people are filming. If it’s not caught on camera, it didn’t happen in the eyes of the law if it’s just our word against a cops.
It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
The concern with bringing your phone is that police have subpoenaed cell providers to force them to turn over cell tower records. The police then used the lists of cell phones connected to those towers to track down protestors.
You shouldn’t bring your phone to a protest because it could end with police kicking your front door in three weeks after the protest has wrapped up.
And completely cover any tattoos. Even more identifiable than your face, honestly.
you can always modify your tattoos, you can’t modify your face once it’s identified. I saw a man literally draw a face on his face before attending a protest. He looked ridiculous but perfectly “defaced”.
I’ve also read about some blackBlocs getting identified, where i live, through their shoes. Police photographed people before and after the movement and their shoes are used as identifying information.
There is always the oldBloc who put their faces and names behind their words and proudly struggle through unions.
it’s already may 1st here. They will be out in about 10 hours. May the force be with them.
Maybe get a dumb burner phone with no personal data on it. You could potentially keep your main phone in a secret/secure pocket.
No. Several Jan 6 participants tried burners and they still got caught because the burners were still linked to their movements and activities and their personal phones were unusually unused/off/immobile for the amount of time the burners were used. You would have to expend a lot of effort to make sure your burner was completely disconnected from yours and your phone’s location, as well as making sure your phone showed signs of appropriate activity in your absence.
Not so easy.
Just having a burner phone works against dragnet surveillance if one is not doing really stupid shit like logging in to one’s personal social media accounts from one.
If however it’s an actual crime which actually gets investigated by actual criminal investigators, they’re going to be coming at it individually and using much more specific techniques than just “use a surveillance warrant to get a list of all mobile phones that connected to certain cell towers at certain points in time and plonk them all on a database to cross-check with similar data from other demonstrations”.
You can’t just treat a burner phone as a second phone that you have active anywhere near your home, place of work or places you normally frequent and you can’t just keep it and keep on using it for a long period of time: the longer one holds on to that burner phone the more data points there will be that can be bulk checked with other, identifyable, data from other sources (say, car tracking data) to find out a more than normal overlap.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if those people with the burner phones had them with them active whilst ridding their personal vehicles which had something like OnStar or were dumb enough to log-in to their Facebook account from them.
The article pretty plainly says the guy was coerced into entering his password. So the headline feels a bit manipulative.
The headline is click-bait. I honestly don’t know why people still read this crap.
So he was “only” coerced, ie likely verbally abused and lied to (which cops are allowed to do) about the consequences of refusing to unlock, instead of being physically forced. Such freedom.
Lemmy quality descended quite quickly. What’s the more intelligent tech community alternative besides hacker news?
It seems everything descends into this samey mess of america bad, eat the rich which I don’t dispute with but I am here for tech and not politics honestly. Time and place for everything.
The amount of low effort comments that seem to only be about points/validation which aren’t even visible for some is tiring.
It used to be that you would look into comments for useful information about the posted article. Now you can skip the comments altogether and the posted links quality also became questionable.
I miss times where you could find links to some niche but full of creativity/usefulness websites in the comments or posts. Those juicy gems of the web. Or learn some fact that you had no idea about.
I want to learn something new being here. Not make my brain feel good with the reward of validation.
What’s the more intelligent tech community alternative besides hacker news?
But it’s invite-only.
Take a deep breath and tell us how you really feel ;-)
I got here a bit late and it seemed like there was some decent discussion going on. Practical advice on how to lock various phones.
Some high quality pasta about how to survive the coming civil war ;-) Honestly good advice for anyone considering civil unrest there.
It’s small, but what’s really missing here? Someone dragging up the constitution? Being forced to incriminate yourself is wrong and any evidence gleaned should be inadmissible. Cops shouldn’t manipulate people into giving up their rights… but that’s the country we live in.
Reddit was a wash in low effort feel good upvote nonsense too. It just got buried faster.
To each his own but until I have time to post a bunch of high quality content, I’m not going to complain so bitterly.
and this is why lemmy is a limp-wristed do-nothing. too many people here want to stick their head in the sand. but by all means, pls share some more star trek memes.
However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking…"
If the precedent is that unlocking the phone is the same category as fingerprint taking, well, what happens if you refuse to be “coerced” into having your prints taken? Even if the legal precedent isn’t fully understood, it looks like the reasoning here isn’t based on whether there was physical force applied, but whether the search required the contents of the person’s mind.
I do t know about fingerprints but I thought a blood draw required cooperation or court order
It’s frustrating to no end that fingerprints and face ID are treated like passwords when they should be treated like usernames.
## How to disable Face ID through the Power Off screen
- Hold down both the Side Button and either Volume Button at the same time for three seconds.
- The Power Off slider should appear. Tap Cancel.
You actually don’t need to hit cancel, you can just hit lock, so you can do this whole thing with your phone in your pocket.
https://appleinsider.com/inside/iphone/tips/how-to-quickly-disable-face-id
This is easier and less intrusive than the lock-button-5-times method because it doesn’t start making a phone call that you have to quickly cancel.
This is the advice people (with iOS) should follow, not disabling biometrics altogether. Using FaceID or TouchID prevents shoulder surfing to find out what the password to your phone is. When local passwords have so much control over a device, using biometrics to prevent anyone from seeing what your passcode is is very useful.
