Stay digitally safe while protesting.
Resources on protecting yourself are plentiful and existed pre-2020. Below are my favorites if you don’t take my word for it.
EFF’s Digital Surveillance Guide - The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s been
The Verge’s Guide to Privacy and Safety - while you’re at it, you might want to view their Android 101: How to stop location tracking.
Time’s Going to a Protest? Here’s how to protect your digital privacy.
The larger scenarios the average protester appears to avoid are usually…
Apprehension of a phone and acquisition of its data.
Tracking pre or post protest from law enforcement, which may include identifying a users’ social media assets.
Implication in unfounded intent tangential to the protesting (rioting, violence).
Mobile Phone
Keeping your digital self the safest would likely entail leaving your phone at home. Since that might contradict keeping your physical self safe (since you might need your phone for other reasons), below are suggestions to make sure that if you or your phone are apprehended, your data remains in an unreadable status.
Confirm your phone is encrypted.
Recently manufactured Android phones and iPhones encrypt your device by default if you use a password to lock your phone.
You can confirm this by checking your settings.
Android: Security -> Encryption & Credentials tab.
Don’t use biometrics - change to a password.
Police have been observed trying to unlock by holding a phone up to faces of their owners and/or forcing to put a finger onto the device. Change out of biometric settings (which I personally don’t recommend) around the time you plan on protesting.
Taking pictures? Keep your phone locked.
Keeping your phone locked as long as possible is your safest bet if you are apprehended. This might occur while you’re taking pictures, potentially of law enforcement.
Disable Location Services
Before you protest, make sure the apps that track your location are at a minimum. Although the risk is small, if you suspect law enforcement would request data from Google or Facebook to find more information on you, minimizing your footprint decreases the ways you can be identified.
Android: Settings > Security > Location
See Android 101: Disabling Location Tracking to better track your mobile location services.
iPhone: Your NFC, Bluetooth and WiFi will only remain disabled for one day. You have you continuously turn off these wireless communications on a regular basis.
At Home
Your associates may still link themselves to you online.
Did you take pictures at the protest? Did your close friends tag you in a social media post? Law Enforcement leverages social media aggregators like Dataminr to assess protesting events,
Ask your friends to not tag yourself, make sure your social media settings don’t track your location.
Scrub your images, watch what location indicators you post online.
If you are concerned about location identification, make sure your locations are turned off in your phone’s camera settings. For the extra cautious, you can download an exif stripper, which will remove any metadata that could identify what device was used.
Exif data is a digital annotation format that allows for additional information to be embedded with your photos.
Desktop: JPEG & PNG Stripper
iPhone: Metapho
Physical
Dress boring. Dress Black.
Dressing like Blackbloc helps protect the whole protest; dressing identically in black prevents anyone from identifying you, or using you as a marker to identify someone else.
Wear your PPE.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) also helps block your face from others’ cameras. Not just law enforcement, but social media and Google facial identification. So even if you’re not taking photos, your face won’t get caught in someone elses’.
Find an online radio transmitter to hear radio communications.
Some websites will keep local law enforcement stations open to the public to listen in, which may help you identify safer locations. While I don’t recommend this for illegal activity, sometimes listening to where protesters are going, moving to, and general size can help you plan next moves.
Broadcastify, might have your local station to listen to.
Local protesters who are licensed to transmit on specific frequencies may also provide stations to tune into during larger protests.
Faraday bags? Know your threat model first.
Some users have asked about Faraday bags (bags that entirely block cell phone signals). The goal here would be to place your phone in Faraday bag when you arrive at the protest, and take the phone out when finished or when you arrive at a safer location.
A Faraday bag won’t help you if open the bag at a Starbucks across the street from the protest. A Faraday bag might also not be effective if you’re protesting in an area where you already frequent, which is common in urban areas.