List your favourite privacy everyday tool/apps!

argante

de0u No offense, but you need to catch up on how antennas work. Your kettle might resonate at a certain frequency, because an antenna can be a piece of wire, after all. The point is that a phone or Wi-Fi antenna will only resonate at a specific frequency (or half, quarter, etc., of that wavelength). If you think I'm wrong, here's a fascinating example from the past that shows this is entirely possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Knowing the resonance frequency - and you know what frequencies Wi-Fi and GSM operate on - you can force the antenna to resonate. It's not a magic.

de0u

argante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

I am aware, also aware of ANGRYNEIGHBOR.

It's not a secret that I have a phone. It's on basically all the time. If I turned it off, I would not be disturbed if my neighbor's cable modem could -- theoretically -- detect the location of my phone while it is off. It is not clear what would be gained by putting my phone, while off, inside a Faraday bag that would itself have a solid radar shadow.

But threat models do differ.

argante

DeletedUser1113 Briar is a very interesting platform because it's not just a messenger, but also a forum/blog and an RSS/Atom reader. All communication is directly through Tor (no Orbot/TorVPN required). Unfortunately, development of this messenger is currently stalled - the developers are planning major improvements, for example, to reduce battery consumption, but they lack the resources.

argante

de0u I am aware, also aware of ANGRYNEIGHBOR.

I like this site :)

You're right that the Faraday bag will reflect the waves and therefore be visible on its own. However, the network won't be able to detect the presence of a phone through reflection. The Wi-Fi sensing I mentioned earlier, thanks to machine learning/AI, is now so accurate that it can distinguish individuals by breathing patterns (Comcast has an option to ignore animals in the settings). So the problem isn't a lack of signals, as these can be acquired even passively through reflections from other sources, but the ability to process them and extract the information you're looking for.

de0u

argante You're right that the Faraday bag will reflect the waves and therefore be visible on its own. However, the network won't be able to detect the presence of a phone through reflection.

Which network?

Is there evidence that one or another network is tracking the locations of phones that are off? That would not be utterly impossible from a pure physics perspective, but that doesn't mean it would be feasible given the sheer complexity of reflectors and resonators and attenuators scattered around.

argante

de0u Let's say your phone is turned off (battery removed). If you transmit a signal at a frequency like WiFi to the antenna, the antenna will respond, but the signal will be very weak and lost in the noise. However, there are specialized techniques for detecting this type of object: NLJD, which can detect so-called harmonic reflections. What's interesting is whether these reflections, which we previously treated as background noise, will no longer allow current home modems to programmatically detect things like phones, given current advances in signal analysis. After all, no one previously imagined that WiFi sensing could be used on a mass scale using home modems/routers.

de0u

argante I'm glad you're tracking this (somebody should be). Personally, my phone is approximately always turned on, with the cellular modem running, and there's a SIM card in it, so I assume my carrier approximately always knows where my phone is.

ManofGraphene

A few apps that I haven't seen listed above yet that are must haves for me, are:
1.
Inter profile Sharing
https://github.com/VentralDigital/InterProfileSharing
Great for sharing anything across profiles. It works without needing wifi, which I personally find quite useful.
2.
Zood location
https://www.zood.xyz/
Simple, private, encrypted location tracker that just works. Includes battery percentage, and temporary sharing even to people without the app.
3.
FUTO keyboard
https://keyboard.futo.tech/
Offline, great text to speech, great text prediction, swipe typing, spacebar scrolling, etc. I personally think its better than Google or Samsung keyboard.
4.
Edge Seek by Sulaiman Oboody
https://apt.izzysoft.de/packages/lsafer.edgeseek
Used for instantly adjusting brightness, super useful compared to having to swipe down twice to access the dimmer slider. You can preset it to work on multiple screen edges or just one. It can control volume as well as brightness, and the sensitivity, size, and color (including invisible) are fully adjustable. This is one of my favourite apps. Sorry if it sounds like a promotion, I promise its not.
5.
Private lock
https://github.com/wesaphzt/privatelock
Super useful for instantly locking your phone based off motion. Sensitivity is fully adjustable, and it automatically restarts even after the device is rebooted. It is designed to lock your phone if it gets snatched, dropped, etc. In my opinion, one of the best simple security apps everyone should have on their phone.
6.
Clipeus by Lucky
https://github.com/x13a/Clipeus
An easy, one-click app to clean your clipboard. I'm not actually sure how secure this is because I believe there are other ways to access clipboard history through device logs or something. I find the app useful anyway though.

I hope this list is useful to people! If anyone has better alternatives, or knows of any potential privacy/security concerns with any of these, please let me know. I'm not a coder or programmer or anything, so getting the opinions of those who know more is always great!

Handlebar6933

Kamika242 I almost went crazy the other day trying to find a way to share a file with someone in an end to end encrypted fashion and without jumping through many hoops or using something like Google drive. Is wormhole the answer?

DeletedUser1123

normieprivacy Anything Fossify. Their apps don't even connect to the internet.

Carrousel7956

ManofGraphene FUTO keyboard
https://keyboard.futo.tech/
Offline, great text to speech, great text prediction, swipe typing, spacebar scrolling, etc. I personally think its better than Google or Samsung keyboard.

this app is crazy good. better keyboard than iOS (4.8 Trillion dollar company btw), better/equal keyboard to Google (4 T company), private, open source swipe typing database.

argante

de0u I'm glad you're tracking this (somebody should be).

In my opinion, this will be one of the main privacy issues we will face in the coming years. What Comcast, among others, offers today will be implemented on a mass scale with the arrival of 6G. Some of these capabilities are already offered by 5G, but 6G is actually designed for it and will be so precise (in terms of wavelength and shape) that even if you turn your phone off, it will be possible to detect which phone model you have (for example, by the shape of the PCB traces). mmWave (5G: 24 GHz – 40 GHz) allows for the detection of objects several centimeters in size, while for 6G, this would be millimeters. Combine this with the breakthrough signal processing provided by AI, and you will be able to precisely track you, for example, by the shape of your nose, teeth, etc., because the short wavelengths allow for this, and ISAC will turn 6G into a massive network radar. And I'm not spreading panic. This is something that is already being worked on.

EDIT: https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1069.pdf

Novaliss

normieprivacy favourite/interesting privacy tools/apps that you enjoy using

This little offline app makes a thief likely to cancel the theft or put your device into BFU:
https://codeberg.org/y20k/stayput/releases

It needs only Notification permission to sound a loud alarm when unplugging the device. The alarm cannot be silenced or even lowered, so the adversary likely either drops it or forces a shutdown, that's your data at rest.

At a hospital bed, in a hotel room etc.. Just allow 'Alarms' in DoNotDisturb if you use that mode.

D01

normieprivacy LUMO, a private AI, it’s from the Proton family of products.

Kamika242

Handlebar6933 Is wormhole the answer?

I don't use LocalSend or Wormhole with the main intention to share something with other people, for me it's more for sending files from my mobile to my tablet and the other way around. LocalSend works fine here and WormHole I've only tested, works also fine, but never tested it for person to person. I mainly use LocalSend and keep WormHole "only for the case", as most files can be shared via the common messenger apps.

graphleo

SovereignCopper but you can set open-meteo as the default source for all the metrics in Breezy. Anyway I prefer don't share location and set up locations manually.

SovereignCopper

graphleo In that case, I don't really see any benefits to using an overengineered weather app like Breezy as opposed to a bare-bones app like Bura.

However, what I would really want to have in a weather app (and I haven't found a single one doing this) is to see weather history: the ability to look back a week or so with detailed info. If anyone knows of an app that allows this, please do say so.

Handlebar6933

Kamika242 I should clarify, I meant files that usually cannot be sent through something like WhatsApp or Signal because they are too large (several GBs in size). I think something like wormhole is precisely what I was looking for

Kamika242

Handlebar6933 like WhatsApp or Signal because they are too large

Yes, that's the reason why I keep WormHole, but you would have to persuade most other people first to install WormHole, because everyone only knows Quickshare.
I had such a situation a year ago, a friend of mine wanted to send me some photos via Signal, but Signal's limit is 8GB per file and they were larger. At this time I had a non GrapheneOS phone, but de-Googled and therefore without Quickshare, unfortunately i hadn't came across WormHole back then.
Today I would ask him to install WormHole.

SovereignCopper

Kamika242 Why would they need to install anything? https://wormhole.page

You can keep using whichever app you want, like iyox Wormhole or Wormhole File Transfer or Destiny, while they use the browser.

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