Mobile Security

_SO MUCH OF THE DAILY ACTIVITY OF A FILMMAKER depends on mobile devices — calls with subjects, emails with colleagues, directions to the day’s shooting location, and so on. With phones as our primary gateway to the internet while in the field, we must take extra care to ensure that these devices are kept secure, and the data held on them is kept private.

READ ON FOR YOUR MOBILE SECURITY STRATEGY:

01: Harden your mobile phone

Lyric Cabral, on working with mobile-first communities for (T)ERROR

The people that I liaised with most commonly do not have access to laptops at home, so their interaction with the internet is on their phone. If you’re on certain levels of public assistance, you are given free government provided phones, and that is the realm within which I have to operate. If I have a laptop and PGP, that’s not really helpful if you have a Yahoo email that you’re checking on your phone. So you have to find the middleground technologically between the technology people can afford and the real security needs.”

Strategy 01
Harden your mobile phone

_TAKE ADVANTAGE OF your smartphone’s built-in security and privacy features with a few easy steps. Following a practice of mobile hygiene protects our phones from many attacks aimed at compromising our most sensitive mobile data (e.g., text messages, photos, contact lists), or undermining our privacy (e.g., revealing our location to unwanted actors).

This is not an exhaustive list, but we’ll cover these core practices to keep your phone secure, and your mobile data private:

While there is no perfect solution to protect your mobile data, review this multi-purpose handbook for an introduction to all things mobile.

Recommendations
BEGINNER
Platforms:
iOS
Android
BEGINNER
Platforms:
iOS
Android
BEGINNER
Platforms:
iOS
Android
Laura Poitras, on phones as tracking beacons

“You’d be remiss not to know that your phone is broadcasting your location. Everytime it calls into a cell phone, it’s telling the cell phone where you are. I think most journalists and filmmakers today are aware of that, but most sources might not be and it is necessary to make sure your sources and people working with you have basic knowledge about things like metadata.”

BEGINNER
Platforms:
iOS
Android
BEGINNER
Platforms:
iOS
Android