➡ This article discusses four useful apps available on the Eftroid store, which is not part of the standard Google Play store. Two of these apps help detect Bluetooth low energy (BLE) signals, which can be used to track devices like AirTags. Another app helps locate lost Google phones, which traditionally lack a ‘Find My Phone’ feature. The article also provides tips on how to use these apps effectively and safely, emphasizing that they are open-source and free to use.
➡ BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) can be used to identify and locate devices around you, which can be helpful for security and surveillance purposes. However, some devices, like iPhones, randomize their MAC addresses, making them less reliable to track. There are apps available that can help you detect devices, including trackers like AirTags or Tile, and even analyze Wi-Fi signals in your area. These tools can increase your understanding of privacy and security issues, and help you protect your privacy.

I’m gonna tell you about four apps you should know about. These are super cool and maybe specialized but it solves some problems we face with modern tech. Specifically two of these apps deal with detecting BLE or Bluetooth low energy. This is the stuff used for trackers like AirTags and can also be used to track you. These apps can tell if someone is stalking you or spying on you and you can even do some reverse stalking. Some time ago I wanted to make an app that did exactly this and amazingly someone made this app and you can use this for so many purposes that I’ll tell you about more than you realize.

Another app solves a problem with the Google phones. Since the Google phones have no connection to Google or Apple we couldn’t do things like find my phone. Well you couldn’t but we can now. These apps aren’t perfect by the way. I can’t necessarily get them all to work consistently but as a beginning they are really cool and if a lot of people use them it may encourage the developers to do more. Also these are all open source projects so you can participate and report bugs and maybe they’ll get better. So are you interested? If so then stay right there! First the four apps I will talk about are all from the Eftroid store.

So these are not available through your standard Google Play store and these are all Android apps. So I’m targeting this to a community using a Google phone like the new Brax 3. It should work though on any Android even if it is a production Google phone but if you don’t have the Eftroid store you can download Eftroid from Eftroid.org. Eftroid is standard on the googled operating systems like CalXOS, EODay, BraxOS. It is not standard on LineageOS so you’ll have to download it for that as well. By the way if you’re not aware of Eftroid store this project actually actively screens any app it puts in the store.

For an app to be on Eftroid one would need to share the complete source code and have Eftroid compile the code. This means that there can never be anything hidden in the source code since it is all exposed. Because of this one can assume that Eftroid apps are always safe so start from that assumption and nothing strange or evil will come from installing these apps that I will talk about. Also all Eftroid apps are always free so no risk at all for all of you. When using the Eftroid store you need to drag it down to update repositories.

This is kind of key to using it otherwise you may not see the latest apps. Okay now that I’ve set the stage let me get to the first app. Find My Device. Find My Device was made by a developer who apparently lost his phone. He didn’t have a Find My Phone feature so either he had a Google phone or some older Android. Newer Google androids should have this. But of course no de-google app will have the capability to have Find My Phone since it is managed by Google and Google will track your location so you don’t want that anyway.

What is cool about this app is that it found several ways around that. I will tell you though that for most of you you will only use one way. The other methods are more complicated and require a more advanced setup and it really isn’t necessary. So the standard way you’ll use this feature is through SMS. The way it works you send a command to the app via an SMS that starts with FMD. For example after you install the app and configure it you just send it an SMS message that says FMD locate.

Then it will text you back with a location and then the location will link to the open street map website so you can actually see where the GPS position points to. When it works it’s really cool. I’ve tried it on two Brax 3 phones and on one it seems to work consistently and on the other it sometimes works and sometimes it does not. So I’m not sure what the reason is. I’ll give you some setup tips in a moment to make it work most of the time. What is really great about this method is that you limit the texting response to an approved number.

So a random person can’t text you FMD locate. And by the way the fact that it is performing this locate via SMS is not a secret. The phone itself will show the conversation would find my device so it is not something you can hide. However if you legitimately lost your phone this will solve the problem. But the neat thing here is that no third party is tracking your device. You’re not relying on a Google or Apple which may give you your phone location but they also store your locations and there’s no subscription service.

Find my device is much more powerful with advanced features like being able to remotely erase your phone or having it take a photo of its surroundings so you know where it is exactly. However I’ll be honest with you these features require that you run an FMD server on your own or trust their public server which is not a good idea especially since we’re talking about a photo storage here. Thus to be honest with you if you ask me how I will use this I would stick to finding the phone only. And if you do it for family then of course they won’t be surprised if they’re looking for you by SMS.

Setup tips for you. You have to of course go to settings and enable the location feature and also you have to fill in the contacts and provide access to whoever can send a locate command to the phone. By default the app uses the GPS position and the cell tower triangulation. This is a self-cell triangulation by the way and not tied to a carrier. But to do the cell triangulation requires you to get an API access key from opencellid.org meaning you set up an account with them and they give you an access key.

It’s not necessary GPS alone is fine. The other thing that you will discover as you use it is that you need to give it permissions. I would grant it all the permissions otherwise it has some buggy behavior since it is for you to use I would not limit it at all. There are some features that require ruling the phone like to do the remote erase but I don’t necessarily recommend doing that unless you’re an advanced user. I’m also not going to recommend using notifications as a way to communicate with find my device as notifications can be tricky to use.

Again for a regular use just the location alone is good enough and just memorize the single command fmd locate. I had fun with this by the way because I use Brax virtual phone on my computer and I’m able to send it the command through SMS without even having a phone. BLE radar. BLE radar is actually an incredibly powerful app that can be used for more things than you think. It’s simple enough install it and then do a scan. Then it will begin reporting the devices around you. But I need to explain precisely what it is reporting.

BLE or Bluetooth low energy is the new tech that that allows products like air tags tile and ring cameras to work. These devices do not use regular Bluetooth but use a more powerful signal that reaches a longer distance like even up to 800 feet though the indoor distance is more like 50 to 100 feet. The requirement is that the device should transmit a BLE signal. iPhone should all be transmitting a BLE signal for the Apple mesh network. Newer androids would also be transmitting a BLE signal for the Google mesh network. Ring cameras and Amazon echoes will transmit using the Amazon mesh network or they call it sidewalk.

So this is a mesh network feature specifically and the phones and devices provide the infrastructure for communications because each device transmits to other devices peer to peer and that’s what the air tags and tile trackers piggyback on. To make it clear this is not a Wi-Fi transmission. So those devices like the Google phones that do not use BLE will not emit a signal. They will not show up on this app. That in itself is a learning experience but when you turn on this app it’s actually incredible how many normie devices are transmitting via BLE.

Yet your only Google phone is surprisingly quiet. Just to prove the point I walked around a neighborhood with this app on and when I finished I looked at the discovered devices and it was incredible what I was seeing. You could basically track people based on their iPhones and Google androids just by walking around outside their homes. I’m not suggesting this be used for some nefarious purpose but let me just give you use cases. If you run this every so often you actually begin to recognize devices because of the mac address. This is the identifier used on radio signals.

If you’ve seen the mac address before you will then start to recognize particular devices around you and you can put a label on it. This can be used to see if someone is stalking you for example. You can actually check to see how far the device is from you. That’s the thing about BLE it can actually be used to triangulate. So again you see the device and you will see their location. As a security measure think of a building. You can actually see if anyone is in a building just by checking for phones in the area or even know how many people there are in a building.

This is a great surveillance device honestly but a surveillance device used for our protection. Now there are limitations and I will explain it to you. If you use the app it will actually tell you if the mac address is reliable or not and the reason for this is that mac addresses can be randomized by the OS. So often it will say that the mac address of an iPhone is randomized and cannot be a permanent identifier. Be aware of this in the iOS implementation of BLE the mac address may only last for 15 minutes but it will say an Apple TV can be reliably detected since it doesn’t randomize.

You should notice a pattern though like a specific BLE transmission will emanate from a particular location. The location is given in the app and so you can use the location as an identifier. You can even use the description of the device like what version of iOS it uses or if it’s an iPad versus an iPhone to give you an idea. Basically it’s like being able to see what’s been invisible to us over the years. I actually started writing a Wi-Fi scanner version of this some time ago though I never did finish it but BLE is actually pretty practical as a scanner nowadays since it is now on the devices we need to track.

Now the other application of this is to see if someone stuck an air tag on you or a tile tracker. All those trackers use BLEs so they would be spotted in an instant. If your particular threat is from someone hiding some tracker on your person or your car then the next app may be simpler. Air guard This app is similar to BLE radar though it is much simpler and it has less features. But for specifically seeing if there’s an air tag or tile tracker this will do the job and it’s simple.

Just do a scan with the app and it finds all Apple devices and all tile devices around you. The nice thing about tile devices is that they don’t change their Mac address so it will be very clear if there’s one nearby. So you can use it for yourselves to find your stuff. Like if you have a tile on your keys then you can find your keys easily using this app and you will recognize that the tile is yours primarily through location but secondarily from the consistency of the Mac address. Air tags have changing Mac addresses so they don’t necessarily give out a specific fixed identifier just like iPhones.

But again the location should be enough to tell you what’s going on. Wi-Fi analyzer Wi-Fi analyzer is not a new kind of app. It’s been around a long time but it’s good to see a version of it on f-troid. This app shows you all the Wi-Fi signals in your area and the signal strength. So this gives you the tools to see if your Wi-Fi is getting throttled because of other Wi-Fi near you. Unfortunately the airwaves are clogged by so much Wi-Fi nowadays that you might be shocked at the number of Wi-Fi routers near you and this app only reports Wi-Fi routers.

Every phone and computer emits Wi-Fi too just as a client and not a server. Where this is good is to set up your Wi-Fi router to use certain frequencies. If your neighbor is hogging channel one on 2.4 gigahertz then you can choose a different channel although usually channel six is the best one as it allows overlaps. The neat thing too is it shows you Wi-Fi including hidden Wi-Fi. This shows you why it’s kind of useless to do hidden Wi-Fi as it is not hidden. You can see it all from this app and just as education for all of you your locations are actually provided to Google and Apple based on the locations of these Wi-Fi routers which have already been pre-mapped and stored on Google and Apple location databases.

So your precise location is determined based on the signal strength of the Wi-Fi around you. Thus this app can also be an educational track into understanding how we are all spied on. Summary. There we go some cool apps that will raise your techiness level up a notch. Now find some people in the community who can really play with these apps more seriously and give you more information on more advanced tricks. I just gave you the basics here. One of these communities is our platform Braxme. There are many people there over 120 000 and they talk about privacy and security issues so it’s great for learning.

On our site we also have other products that you can consider for your privacy journey and they’re going to be found in the store there. If you find a product of interest I thank you for your support as it enables us to make content for this channel. We have things like Brax 3, Brax Virtual Phone, Brax Mail and Bytes VPN. Really important tools for privacy. Thank you for watching and see you next time. [tr:trw].

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.