Cambridge Analytica, WhatsApp metadata, snooping smartphone apps… almost every week there are new incidents involving the ‘oil of the 21st century’ and how it is being lifted without our consent.
It’s not just Zuckerberg1 and the odd IT nerd sticking their camera, paranoia has gone mainstream and the misappropriated Post-it is in mass circulation. In addition to the sticky note, there are now beautiful solutions. Beautiful here means elegant, practical and durable.
Spy-Fy is perhaps one of the first to take care of the average paranoid with Spyslide. But before Spy-Fy got its production chain together after successful Kickstarter funding, there were already plagiarisms in the well-known Far Eastern shops. Basically, the idea is not so new that the Spyslider is the ultimate innovation, but it has been implemented in an optimal way! Spy-fy’s demand for quality also forced the manufacturers to delay delivery, as the desired result could only be achieved with a new manufacturer.
The small sliders have been delivered since mid-June and make a good impression on the device.
If you want to take your privacy even more seriously, you can dig even deeper into your bag of tricks. On a PC, the webcam and microphone can be disabled via the BIOS/UEFI settings. For Macs, a former NSA employee has developed software2 that monitors access to the camera and microphone and lets you know when Skype, for example, is trying to access them.
For smartphones, there are limited solutions of this kind. Either you know your way around Android custom roms or you root your Android smartphone and use Xposed and the XPrivacy plugin3 to protect yourself. Or you can go all the way with the Librem 5 from Purism4, which will be available in January 2019. This device lives privacy down to the last detail. The camera, microphone and modem can be completely deactivated by means of hardware switches, and the Linux-based operating system developed by Purism is also designed with privacy in mind.
The ultimate way is to switch off!
Spyslider in Spy-Fy Shop, from 10 €
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1 zeit.de “Kleb’s ab” (German article)
2 OverSight by Objective-See
3 XPrivacyLua
4 Purism Librem 5
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