Know your rights!!

Your computer, phone, and other digital devices hold vast amounts of personal information about you and your family. This sensitive data is worth protecting from prying eyes, including those of the government.

You’ve been pulled over. Or police are at your front door with a warrant. Or you’ve been arrested, and the police have asked you to unlock your phone. What do you do? Can you refuse? What are your rights? What happens if you say no?

If a cop asks you to unlock your phone, you have all rights to decline. When and only when you are being arrested for a crime and had been filed with all the official paper works, the law enforcement can legally oblige you to do so or can hit the backdoors stating the IT Act with the help of their IT wing. This is not valid when you are being remanded without a FIR and had not been provided to the court. But cops are cops and since we are in India, there is a high possibility that you might be forced to unlock it. In countries like the US and the others, fingerprints and face scans such as Face ID on iOS devices are not the same as physical evidence, and that even with a warrant, the government has no right to force suspects to incriminate themselves. Passcodes, PIN and pattern are all considered to be a testimonial asset. Meaning they simply cannot force you to get it out of you.

This brings us down to the phones and the respective OSs that we have. Apple has a very good track record. After the Dec 2^nd, 2015 attack during which 14 people were killed, law enforcement officials found an iPhone 5C belonging to Farook. The phone was locked with a passcode. In February, 2016, the FBI went to court seeking to force Apple to rewrite the software running on iPhones to allow the bureau to crack the passcode. But even after 11 orders, apple rejected the requests and challenged the court. But eventually the FBI withdrew the case stating they had done it by themselves.

But the twist is that, Apple devices when connected to the internet keeps uploading stuffs to its cloud even when its locked, and legally the law enforcements can demand those, off the device cloud stored data from Apple. But unlike Apple, android devices don’t do so, it has to be unlocked to do so. But even after all these, apple is a bit more safer as all their devices are encrypted by default. But that’s not the case in Android. Even though google after 2014 took steps to encrypt devices out of the box, not many devices followed the same and that it had only stayed as a user decidable option buried deep inside the settings menu.

Encrypting your phone, locks and makes your phone difficult to crack. Many 3^rd party developers (thanks to XDA Devs) have made fabulous developments which had given brands a run for their money. Also, google has included “lock on startup” feature which locks and encrypts the phone at the recovery level, meaning it is making it even more difficult to access your data. Custom Roms (3^rd party OS) such as Lineage OS has added many important features such as “Lock down” and “Permission Notifier” to their OS. Lockdown simply helps u to deactivate your biometrics right from the lock screen, forcing you to unlock only using the passcode or pattern whatever u have in place. This is for those situations where u r about to be forced to unlock your phone with your biometrics, now that you have this handy its jus a click away. Permission Notifier has been a game changer, this shows you a small notification with a small camera or mic icon whenever any app is using either of it. This was incorporated long back and here we have Apple including it in IOS 14 as a brand-new feature.

So yah its you and you are the one adding value to it to be so important, lately it has become a very important ID card of yours which you can’t afford to loose