-Preserving your privacy in the digital age
requires work.
Most cities and towns are covered
by a robust arsenal of surveillance tools.
And social-media photos and video
can contain sensitive information
around someone else's identity and involvement.
So if you're heading to a protest,
here are some things to remember
if you want to protect your anonymity
and respect the privacy of others
while exercising your First Amendment right.
You need to make one key decision --
whether to bring your phone.
-I think all of us are aware of
just how much of our personal lives
are sort of stored on these devices.
And so definitely the safest thing to do is,
if you can, to leave your main phone at home.
-If you do decide to take your device,
there are ways to beef up its security.
-On an iPhone, your phone is likely encrypted by default
if you've set a passcode.
On an Android, you actually need to go in
and turn on full disk encryption in your settings.
If you do that, that means that as long as you have a long
and strong password on your phone,
it will be incredibly difficult or in some cases
potentially even impossible for a law enforcement agency
to open that phone and gain access
to all the information on it.
There's a number of reasons why thumbprints
and face ID are less secure, including just that, you know,
a cop could hold your phone up to your face
and unlock it or push your thumbprint to it.
-Next, think about how you will get to the protest.
-You want to turn all location services
off on your phone before you head to a protest,
because that is another way that you can be tracked.
-If you drive, assume your license plate will be scanned
and logged by an automatic license-plate reader.
They can be found mounted on poles or police cruisers,
and they capture and log every license plate that passes.
At the protest, you could be tracked or identified
in a number of ways.
Many police departments use cell-site simulators,
often called stingray devices or crossbows,
which mimic cellphone towers and trick your phone
into connecting to it and sending the information
there in addition to a real cellphone tower.
-So essentially this allows them to intercept
and collect SMS text messages within a certain area.
-Keeping your phone off or on airplane mode
will limit what it connects to.
-The easiest way to protect yourself from this
is to use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app.
I recommend Signal.
It is a free open-source encrypted messaging app.
And if you are messaging your friends or family
or loved ones on Signal,
it is almost impossible for law enforcement to intercept that.
-Users can set Signal messages to disappear
after they're seen or within a few hours or days.
WhatsApp also uses end-to-end encryption,
but it is owned by Facebook.
Photos taken on your phone are encoded with metadata
that includes the time and GPS coordinates
of where the photo was taken.
And if you post that to social media,
the metadata is still there.
-Now, when people start posting photos en masse --
you know, there are thousands or tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of photos
from protests being posted -- police or law enforcement
can also go through those photos programmatically,
so sort of scraping large amounts of photos
from the Internet, looking through them
using things like facial-recognition software
or other software to analyze them.
And then also, you want to strip the photo of that metadata,
because you don't want to just hand that type of data over,
again, not just to the police, but to anyone on social media
that might want to use it to do harm.
And so an easy way to do that is just to throw
the photo onto your desktop and take a screenshot of it
and then post the screenshot instead of the original photo.
That effectively strips that where
and when metadata from the photo
and makes it harder to be abused for mass surveillance purposes.
-Tools such as Image Scrubber will blur the faces in any photo
you want to post to social media,
which will prevent law enforcement
from using facial-recognition software to identify anyone.
-So consider that, you know,
many cities are essentially covered in CCTV cameras.
Private businesses may have CCTV cameras.
Amazon has partnered
with more than a thousand police departments
to essentially allow police to request footage
from Ring camera devices
that people put on their front doors.
If you are concerned about being targeted by facial recognition,
you want to cover as much of your face as possible.
You know, wear sunglasses or something like that,
as well as a mask.
-But it's important to remember
that each of these pieces of data
can be put together to create a comprehensive picture of you,
your employment, your contacts and associates,
and your travels, whether you want it or not.
-You know, just taking a moment
to just consider the potential implications
of everything that you share and post.
And remember again that, you know,
others might be more at risk than you are.
You don't have to be a hacker whiz.
You know, these are basic steps that everyone can learn to take,
and each one that you take makes you and your community
a little bit safer.