Obviously delete this if against the rules for being too cool.
The average person would do more Cool Stuff if they didn’t think they would be caught. Asking for a friend of course.
Can my friend put grease on a disposable glove and smother cameras and sensors then dispose the glove at their home or otherwise away from the site of coolness?
A net/mesh around one of the wheels that’s dropped on it while passing by?
Let’s assume they would have their phone on them as well. Would a VPN protect them? Or just leave at home / farraday cage bag?
Bonus points if the person could be carrying around the materials and a mask/sunglasses to lessen facial ID etc. and wouldn’t have to do much more than turn on a vpn to obfuscate things the spy in their pocket could narc on. The less friction the better
VPNs operate on layer 3 of the OSI model. The “physical” connection between your… friend’s phone and the service provider is layers 1 (radio) and 2 (4G/5G/LTE/whatever). The phone company knows who’s phone is connected and sending traffic to which tower (and how much traffic, when). They know the traffic is going to a VPN service (based on the protocol + publicly known address of the destination). They just don’t know the contents or the final destination of the traffic beyond the VPN service.
The information they have from layer 2 (signal strength at multiple towers, IMEI, SIM) is enough to identify the device, the subscriber and triangulate the source of the signal to a neighborhood. It may not be as precise as GPS, but it is enough to blow up an alibi or strengthen the case for a warrant.
If a phone is within 2000 feet of a crime scene, that might not be enough (under liberal democracy rules), but if a phone is always within 2000 feet of a series of intermittant crimes over the span of months, the owner is going to be the #1 suspect, and the police are going to seize it.