Protect Your Mobile Privacy with RayHunter #shorts

Our Take

Credit to STS Technologies LLC for putting a spotlight on RayHunter, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's open-source tool that helps regular people detect IMSI catchers — those fake cell towers (sometimes called Stingrays) that police and other actors use to scoop up phone identifiers and location data without a warrant. It's a solid, low-key piece of consumer privacy tech, and the fact that it's open-source instead of a black-box product matters: you can actually audit what it's doing instead of trusting a vendor's marketing copy.

We cover license plate readers here, but IMSI catchers and ALPR networks are cut from the same cloth. Both are dragnet tools that collect data on everyone to maybe catch someone, both get deployed with minimal public oversight, and both tend to expand quietly until a community realizes it's been tracked for years without ever voting on it. Knowing your phone might be getting pinged by a rogue tower is step one. Knowing that your car is getting photographed and logged at intersections across town is step two.

If you want to see how far that second kind of tracking has spread near you, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on secretive surveillance contracts in your city, our take-action page has concrete next steps.