
Australian uses snack bags as Faraday cage to block tracking by employer - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/australian-man-uses-snack-bags-as-faraday-cage-to-block-tracking-by-employer/
======
leeoniya
> Colella is now apparently living the flexible work schedule life in full—NPR
> reports he is now working as an Uber driver.

and being GPS tracked more intensively than ever before. oh, sweet irony :D

~~~
raincom
When I used to work as a security guard, I used to cheat my security rounds.
Who wanted to make a round every hour or 30 mins.

Things changed like 8 years ago, now every security guard needs to scan a bar
code at various places to show that he/she is indeed doing his/her rounds.

~~~
caf
Couldn't you just snap a photo of the barcodes, then scan a printout next
time?

~~~
a3n
Couldn't he just ... do anything else except shirk?

~~~
caf
Certainly, but I'm actually questioning the efficacy of the barcode system in
preventing shirking, not this individual's questionable choices.

------
rusk
The key here being that he _openly stored his PDA device in an empty foil
“Twisties” bag_.

Openly. Made no secret of his subterfuge. Maybe even boasted about it what a
dope.

~~~
tankenmate
There's no point making it a secret, once someone looks at the GPS logs his
would have gaping holes in the logs compared to other workmates. You can hide
where you are, but you can't hide that you are hiding.

~~~
rxhernandez
Well you can fake GPS coordinates but it's typically much more difficult.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Doesn't Android at least have a debugging option to fake location?

------
kleiba
What I don't get: why would you prefer the greasy inside of a snack bag for
the PDA over a clean piece of aluminum wrap? Surely, he will have to use the
device after he's done golfing.

And why didn't he just leave the device on some bogus location outside the
golf court so the tracking wouldn't be interrupted? Surely, when asked where
he was all day, he would have to be able to name some location, so it would be
better to actually leave the phone there.

~~~
Terr_
If you don't want to get the phone greasy, turn the bag inside-out.

If you don't want to get everything else greasy, put the inverted bag inside
another bag.

Bonus: Two layers of shielding.

~~~
pvelagal
+1 :)

~~~
pvelagal
4 downvotes for "like"ing the 2-bag technique ? I am amazed. In a puzzle i was
asked long ago, the solution was similar to this.

~~~
fractallyte
General rule on HN: if your comment doesn't contribute usefully to the
discussion, _don 't comment_!

------
kozak
The man didn't want to be tracked, so he went to work for Uber.

~~~
rpeden
I definitely understand not wanting to be tracked.

In this case, though, it looks like he mostly did it he so he could say he was
working (and get paid) while he was actually out playing golf.

At least as an Uber driver, he can play golf as much as he'd like! Although
he'll now have to choose been playing golf and making money.

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
He _gets_ to choose.

That flexibility is very valuable itself.

~~~
logfromblammo
He didn't want to be a clockwork orange.

He preserved his own ability to choose, but then when he chose, he chose
poorly.

YPTFPSD: Read the book by Anthony Burgess. The exposition character explains
the ethics of choice in the context of mechanical fruits.

The main thrust of the book is that if you remove the human capacity to choose
to do wrong, you also strip the choice to do right of all its virtue. You have
to let Alex and his droogs be thugs, or we would all become robots. We'd all
be clockwork oranges on a mechanical orange tree, clicking and whirring away
with only our pre-programmed gears to guide us.

~~~
praneshp
> YPTFPSD

I'll bite, please, can you tell me what that means? Googling brings this post
up as the only useful result.

~~~
logfromblammo
You're Posting Too Fast. Please Slow Down.

It's what HN tells you whenever you try to write more than about five posts
every four hours. I don't know the actual parameters, but they are
ridiculously conservative, and very obviously waived for certain accounts.

When it happens, the only way to actually provide a meaningful response to
someone in a timely fashion is to edit a previous post. Which breaks the
expected flow of a conversation, obviously. It's the thing I hate most about
HN, without reservation.

~~~
dfc
You can also "provide a meaningful response in a timely fashion" if any of the
recent messages get upvoted. It can be a little annoying but the easy solution
is to consider how useful your comment is to the community before hitting
submit.

------
ajross
Yeah, the guy was clever but clearly cheating and he deserves to be fired.
Now, about that reporter:

> Aluminum is not a great conductor—it heats up when a lot of power is pushed
> through it—so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to
> block a strong radio signal from inside.

Uh... what? I mean, I guess, if you're operating a tracking radar or long
distance microwave transmitter inside that snack bag, sure. But a LTE radio
with a GPS? Are you serious?

~~~
Neeek
Aren't power lines aluminium?

~~~
sandl
Indeed, they often consist of aluminium for conductivity and steel for
stability.

------
tonylemesmer
Same trick as in the Will Smith film Enemy of the State (except Smith is
trying to block government tracking)

~~~
caio1982
That movie was spot-on about so many privacy and surveillance issues we have
today (almost 20 years ago...). However Faraday cages were already a pretty
known trick, this guy "just" innovated with the material used.

~~~
nolok
Parent comment is about the fact that snack bag is already used as a Faraday
cage in that movie, so your last line is wrong

~~~
caio1982
I've watched it 20 years ago so I don't remember seeing such scene. I do
remember Gene Hackman explaining about cages when his hideout is shown though.

~~~
tehmaco
It's in the scene in the hotel lift - Hackman gets Smith to remove various
things, and stuffs the trackers in a foil crisp (aka chip) packet, and the
techs lose tracking on them.

~~~
sogen
[https://youtu.be/2u6KdHmoMbw?t=35s](https://youtu.be/2u6KdHmoMbw?t=35s)

------
bitL
We are really going full-steam to innate slavery in a trust-less society,
everybody's movement optimized for maximal profit, and enforced by crab
mentality "why should anyone have fun?"... Is there some sane place left?

The business owners would never subject themselves to this...

~~~
pkaye
Now he is working for himself and can things at his own pace.

~~~
OtterCoder
He is, but the rest of his former co-workers aren't, nor his replacement.

~~~
pkaye
When they are ready, they too can join him on Uber.

------
Havoc
We've also got tracking clauses in our employment stuff (specifically the work
phone).

Not ideal, but frankly I'm not particularly worried. I can leave the phone at
home & frankly employer isn't a privacy concern for me.

Big data companies that can make connections between data sets & crunch it for
patterns etc...that I'm less keen on.

~~~
dognotdog
Personally, I would not agree to being tracked by an employer, unless there
was a really good reason, e.g. safety concerns, as it invites abuse of power,
even unintentionally.

Stuff like this exacerbates disrespect, distrust and suspicion in
employer/employee relationships, in a way I believe no one benefits. Employers
tend to use these tools to aggressively police minor infractions, though
pretending to only want to catch the few bad apples, driving away the good
employees in favour of those who think they can game the system anyway with a
tit-for-tat mindset.

In the end trust is eroded, everybody is unhappy, and the underlying issues as
to why those bad apples aren't doing their jobs in the first place is never
resolved or even investigated.

~~~
Havoc
Philosophically I agree with your stance.

In practice - and particularly in my circumstances - I've found the tracking
clause to be palatable, or at least begrudgingly acceptable.

Perhaps my employer is an outlier, but they don't enforce minor infractions at
all. So while the manual says we can track you 24/7 the reality is there is no
tracking - I literally get calls from my boss asking what country I'm in
because half the time they don't know where I am or what I'm doing.

I've seen the actual policy employed twice - in both cases the employee did
something deeply unethical. The top dogs take a very dim view on that kind of
stuff so the employees found themselves on the wrong end of HR reviewing
policy compliance carefully. So be it - I don't need sketchy co-workers.

------
rajacombinator
Impressive, I’m surprised chip bags can make effective faraday shields. I’d
consider this grounds for promotion of this guy, he’s obviously too clever for
what he’s doing.

------
gnode
"Aluminum is not a great conductor" Compared to what? Graphene?

~~~
logfromblammo
This threw me as well. Of the pure metals, the holy trinity for conductivity
is silver, copper, and gold, with aluminum sliding in at 4th place. Due to
cost considerations, copper and aluminum are the most widely used for
conducting electricity, with aluminum about half as conductive as copper
(therefore requiring different building code guidelines).

But I'm not sure that translates to aluminized-mylar. Sometimes conductors get
weird in thin films or at material boundaries.

Organic compounds are great conductors whenever you can find a chain of
delocalized p-orbitals, such as in graphene or cis-polyacetylene or
polyaniline or polythiophene. PEDOT/PSS is a polymer related to polythiophene
that is used in anti-static bags, transparent electrode, electrochromic films,
capacitor cathodes, and it is printable. Polyaniline is typically used in
batteries and supercaps.

So an aluminized-mylar chip bag is probably not a great conductor in
comparison to one made from PEDOT/PSS backed with PET. And obviously, a chip
bag made from graphene-on-copper-foil would be the best, if anyone could
afford to buy a $1000 snack.

~~~
londons_explore
If you look at an aluminium mylar bag under a microscope you'll see that the
coverage of aluminium is actually rather low, and it's more flakes of
aluminium on the surface which don't connect with each other in places.

It's that lack of connection which makes it a lousy shield.

------
tspike
Stupid question: why couldn't he just turn his phone off? If all signals are
blocked, what's the difference on the other end?

~~~
Jemmeh
Your phone logs when you turn it off and on. It can't log the difference in
why you lost signal though. So this guy just says "See, my phone was on the
whole time, but there was no signal at the work site..."

------
jbb67
I had a great deal of sympathy for him preventing being tracked until I read
that he did it so he could play golf instead of working.

------
cafard
Not that I want crumbs on my phone, but how does one ground a snack bag with a
phone in it?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
There's no need for a Faraday cage to be grounded.

A car forms an acceptable Faraday cage to protect occupants when struck by
lightning even when isolated by its rubber tires, and a plane can be struck by
lightning thousands of feet from the ground and still protect its occupants
(though the lightning will still damage electronics if they're in the current
path through the machine).

~~~
scotty79
Example with plane is better. For the voltages of lightning, car with rubber
tires (possibly wet ones) is pretty much grounded.

Conductor and isolator are relative terms.

------
trhway
looks like pants and jackets of the near future will feature Faraday cage
pockets - switching the tracking on/off will be as easy as just moving
smartphone from regular pocket into the Faraday one.

~~~
_wmd
That's a brilliant product idea, I'd happily buy it off the shelf

~~~
jpindar
There are pocket sized Faraday cage pouches, you could sew them into whatever
pocket you want.

------
Shivetya
Similar, I used to work for a guard company. We implemented a process where
employees reported to work by calling from an assigned set of phones at each
client. they also signed out of work by calling from the same number.

needless to say we had all sorts of attempts to use other numbers but that
never would work. since we had ANI numbers I doubt they could be spoofed.

now we never went as far as having them call in hourly, likely that would be
dependent on client requirements. still I understand why the guy in the
article was fired and honestly if he was skipping out then so be it

~~~
djrogers
> since we had ANI numbers I doubt they could be spoofed.

ANI is just the fancy name for what we call caller-id, it's not a special kind
of phone number. It's also highly susceptible to spoofing...

~~~
c22
Automatic Number Identification (ANI) is not the same system as caller ID. ANI
is used for billing purposes and is harder to spoof than CID. Caller ID uses
in-band tones which is why it's so easily spoofed.

------
ivanhoe
Article states that: "so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to
try to block a strong radio signal from inside" \- but if remember correctly,
unless grounded, Faraday's cage will not affect the inner source at all,
right? Gauss's law is only about the sum of external sources being 0.

~~~
tzs
I would think that if it blocks outside signals from getting in, it would have
to also block inside signals from getting out, because Maxwell's equations
work equally well regardless of what direction time moves.

Imagine a charge inside a Faraday cage. You wiggle it around, causing
electromagnetic waves. If those were not blocked, they would cause various
charges outside the cage to wiggle around. Call this experiment #1.

That should mean that if instead of wiggling the inside charge around, you had
wiggled all the outside charges around in the same pattern that experiment #1
caused them to wiggle in, the result should be the inside charge wiggling the
same way you wiggled it in experiment #2.

------
beavis2
Well, it's unfortunate that we have people like this who make employers feel
the need to track their workers.

~~~
klibertp
I'm not entirely convinced that "people like this" are the sole reason
employers want, like, and do track every breath of employees.

~~~
JadeNB
> I'm not entirely convinced that "people like this" are the sole reason
> employers want, like, and do track every breath of employees.

I would go further and assert that, in most cases, "people like this" probably
aren't any, or are only a negligible part of the _reason_ , only the _excuse_
to allow them such tracking.

~~~
cortesoft
What is their actual purpose in tracking?

~~~
klibertp
Honestly, I think it's mostly to assert their power over workers. It's natural
for people to do this if they can: it feels good and makes them feel in
control, even if it's not very effective or is downright detrimental to the
bottom line. It's also natural to search for plausible excuses for such
behavior - nobody wants to admit that they just get a boner (metaphorically)
from bossing others around.

Just my general opinion, I have too little information to say if the tracking,
in this case, is actually a rational and net-positive policy and not someone's
power trip.

~~~
pdimitar
This is what I observed in all but 3 supervisors I've ever met (I had dozens),
and that says a lot when coming from a guy with 17 years of career.

------
Nomentatus
Note that unlike other metals aluminum only blocks some frequencies, not all
frequencies. Low ones go through - magnets work quite effectively even through
sheet aluminum and can transmit power. Which is what made Rossi's cold fusion
"demonstrations" so suspicious to me.

------
edem
Note to self: keep a snack bag on myself at all times...just in cage...

------
mark212
not even original! From the movie "Enemy of the State." This video at the 0:44
mark, Gene Hackman searches Will Smith and puts his stuff into an empty chip
bag.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u6KdHmoMbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u6KdHmoMbw)

