
Advertisement
This should be pretty obvious, but the best way to lock people out of your phone is to put a lock on your phone. It’s your first line of defence against any kind of infiltrator, whether they're rogue flatmates trying to Facebook chat a bunch of PornHub links at your dad, or police officers swiping through your WhatsApp while their colleague uses his knee to gently force your face into the pavement.According to Open Rights Group, most of the time the police can’t legally ask you to unlock your phone during a stop and search. They can go through your wallet and your bag, and scour your body for any hidden gak or guns, but there’s no way they can justify making you unlock your phone. Or at least not without prior consent – thanks to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which was signed into law a decade before any regular person even had the internet, if police already have reasonable grounds to believe that your phone contains evidence of a crime, they can ask for it to be unlocked.
Advertisement
Advertisement
If you’re worried about your mobile privacy and haven’t already done this, you’ve fucked it, basically. You may as well give up on the whole charade right now, scan your birth certificate and bank details into Find My Friends and accept that your life is effectively a very dull version of The Truman Show for any GCHQ operative who feels like checking in on you whenever they please.Depending on your phone’s operating system (iOS or Android), there are ways you can tell your phone not to track you at all. Shutting these off will basically make your expensive device about as useful as a talking rock, but the upside is that it can keep you out of jail if you ever decide to go joyriding/bank-robbing/basically want to commit any kind of crime and not have your location tracked by cops.On iOS, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services and toggle the primary switch to “off”. If you have an Android phone, go to Settings > Location access (or "Location and security”) > Google Wi-Fi & mobile network location (or "Use wireless networks”) and uncheck the setting. That said, it can be beneficial to keep location data on as it can prove your innocence just as much as your guilt.

Advertisement
Even if the police can justify searching your phone, there’s still a lot of debate over whether they have a right to access the data you store in the cloud. (Most of the time, "the cloud" means files you store in Dropbox or similar services, which technically aren’t on your phone but can be downloaded instantly with the tap of a button via the cloud service’s app.)The Open Rights Group say that police could probably legally go through any files in your cloud storage app that you have already downloaded locally (AKA: onto your phone), but that they couldn’t touch the cloud files that are linked to in the app but not already downloaded to your phone.The problem is that many of these apps make distinguishing which files are local and which are in the cloud virtually impossible, so the police could easily say they had no practical way of differentiating between the two types, therefore had reason to believe all the files were already stored locally on your device.USE ENCRYPTION APPS FOR TEXT MESSAGING
There are a number of apps for iOS and Android that allow you to encrypt your text messages. These apps hide behind an extra passcode that you’ll need to decrypt the messages, so if someone tries to pull the text messages out without the code they’ll all be encrypted gibberish. A good text encryption app for Android is ChatSecure, and its iOS equivalent can be found here.
Advertisement
Another way to avoid incrimination is to minimise the amount of data you carry on your phone, according to Open Rights Group. They say you shouldn’t carry a full address book or calendar on your smartphone, as these would be the first things the police would mine for evidence. (A quick related tip: instead of naming your drug dealer “Cocaine Adam” in your contacts, try something less conspicuous, like “Adam”.)Another way to minimise your data is by using two email accounts. If you like to keep your email archives online then consider getting an additional email account. Have the primary account forward a small subset of emails to the second account. Use this second account on your mobile devices and be more aggressive about deleting old mail, knowing the archive is on a different account and inaccessible from your smartphone.WIPING YOUR PHONE REMOTELY WILL MAKE YOU LOOK REALLY GUILTY
If any modern smartphone is stolen, the user can generally wipe it remotely from a computer by using technology like Find My iPhone (Android has similar remote-wipe features). This is great if you’ve drunk too much to remember how to hold an inanimate object and dropped it on the night bus home, but using this feature after police have confiscated your phone is essentially the same as trying to set fire to your victim’s blood-soaked clothes after the cops have bagged them as evidence.
Advertisement
While all the tips above are handy steps to follow if you want to minimise the risk of incriminating yourself via your smartphone, I asked Maguire to give me his absolute best bit of advice.“Don’t use your phone’s to-do list for organising criminal acts, maybe?” he replied.So there you have it: don’t ask Siri to remind you to burglarise the local off-license at 8PM next Tuesday and you’re golden. Better yet, just don’t commit any crimes at all.@michaelgrothausMore stories about snooping authorities:Kim Dotcom Wants to Keep Your Virtual Life PrivateJacob Appelbaum Doesn't Have Much Hope for the Future of PrivacyA Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Online Life More Private in 2014