Written by Aaron Kelley

Our Los Angeles office recently had the opportunity to test our recommendations for those who wish to avoid mandatory emergency alerts (and test alerts) within their mobile devices, and the results were surprising. On Wednesday, October 4th, 2023 at 11:20 Pacific, three of our devices alerted, but one did not.

There has been many conspiracy theories about how the recent test alert was an attempt by the government to collect data about our locations, but we do not buy into that. We just wanted to know if our settings worked. For our test, we full reset four mobile devices. Two were a Pixel 6A with GrapheneOS default settings. The other two were an Apple iPhone 14 with default settings. All four devices possessed eSIM service from Mint with cellular service from T-Mobile. All four were next to each other with a strong signal. The following settings represent the modifications to each GrapheneOS device. The device on the left had full alerts allowed while the one on the right had everything disabled.

The iPhones were similar. The one on the left had everything turned on while the one of the right had all turned off.

The time finally came. The GrapheneOS and iPhone devices with alerts enabled both rang loud with the test notification as expected. The GrapheneOS device with alerts disabled stayed silent with no notifications as hoped. The surprise was the iPhone which had all alerts disabled. It also blared a loud tone and presented the test message, even though we informed it not to display any alerts.

This is another reason we prefer un-Googled devices such as GrapheneOS over any Apple or Google stock device. They do what you tell them to do.

This is a guest post from Aaron Kelley, director of consultations in our Caribbean office.

We have all heard of the many new companies which offer to remove our unwanted online data. Most simply want a quick buck to cash in on the popularity of privacy. We have always discouraged the use of these services for two reasons. First, they never remove everything. If your home address is on 27 websites, and a service removes 26 of them, I only need to see the one page they missed to get your information. The second reason is that it is always best to do this yourself. You will recognize sensitive data that will be missed by the service which you hired. Today, we present a third reason we suggest avoiding these services: Doxxing.

This week, we received an email from a data removal company called NetScrubbers. They demanded that we remove any data which we stored about their client. They disclosed the following to us, which we redacted for the privacy of their client.

This company was hired by an individual to clean up their online presence. Instead, they sent the full name, email address, age, cell number, current home address, previous home address, business affiliations, and social media profiles of the person to thousands of email addresses. They scoured the person's email account for anyone who they communicated with and sent a generic removal request. In other words, they published more details than were previously available.

We had no contact with their customer, so I did some digging. I was finally able to associate the Gmail address with a business which had contacted us a year ago about our services. Their customer used an alias name for privacy, but NetScrubbers disclosed enough real information about their client to connect us to their alias.

Please avoid these types of companies. They do more harm than good. If you truly want to clean up your online data, use our free guide.

AK