this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Police Misconduct
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Never unlock your phone for cops. Turn off biometrics if you think you'll be encountering police. You can't be forced to enter a password or number to unlock your phone, but can be forced to use fingerprint or face id to unlock.
Once unlocked, they will make a clone of your phone's contents to search through at their leisure. They will access any open social media or other accounts and copy any messages from those also. It doesn't matter if you "have nothing to hide" they can find things to incriminate you or people you know. They can hold that data indefinitely, in case anything you've done becomes a crime later.
Instead of fumbling with your phone to turn ~~on~~ off biometrics just hold down the power button and reboot. Takes seconds and doesn't look suspicious.
Next unlock will force a pin and skip biometrics. At least on android.
On my pixel phone, it's a two step process, but you can press power and volume up. Then you choose Lockdown, and it requires a pin for the next time.
This is the Worst new "feature" I got when upgrading from pixel 4a to 8.
5 clicks of sleep/wake on iPhones also trigger the pin unlock. Also easy to do while in your pocket.
Tried it. Why do the police want me to set up Bixby?
I just tried holding the power button down on my android and it doesn't reboot the phone. I think they got rid of that feature and replaced it with opening up the useless Google Assistant crap.
You can change this in the settings to make the power button a power button again.
It depends on the phone. On my Samsung phone, my only options for holding the power button are to wake bixby or bring up a lockdown menu.
Genius tip, thx
You need to turn them off, not on. The police can force you open your phone with them, but they can't force you to use a code or pattern since that is proprietary.
that was in error. i meant off. i updated it.
the reboot thing would force a pin to unlock. as you stated it doesn't allow fingerprint to unlock.
If I thought there was any chance of police seizure at all, including interacting with the police, I turn my phone off.
My phone is encrypted, and can only be initially unlocked (decrypted) via the pin code.
Law enforcement has all kinds of methods to extract information from a powered on phone post-decryption. Once it's off and the storage onboard is encrypted, they either need to force me to give them the code, which, anything short of torture will not compel me to do, or brute force the pin, likely resulting in my phone locking out, requiring even more access, into my online accounts to unlock it (and/or wiping the phone), or brute force the encryption directly which will likely take millions of years with existing technology.
Even if a judge orders me to unlock it, I would refuse because the information on there, stuff I've said in confidence to others, could be used against me as testimony. The constitution protects me from incriminating myself. So I would simply argue (through my lawyer) that doing so would violate my right not to self incriminate.
Good luck coppers.
I mean, they can just buy most of that stuff from Google, no warrant needed because our legislators are dinosaurs.
Just keep biometrics off at all times.
Well, they do have to have a search warrant first.
That's so 30 years ago.