Mobile · 2018-01-05

This app by Snowden ‘Haven’ turns your phone into home security system – New app

This new smartphone app protects your physical space & property using the phone’s sensors while warning you via encrypted communication. ‘Haven’ can detect light, sound, motion & vibration on a phone around a space that you want to secure. It then pushes notifications to your main phone or to other phones of your choosing when it detects an intrusion or other detectable event using SMS, Signal & Tor.

This open source app, which has just entered its public beta phase, was created by Snowden’s, ‘Freedom of the Press Foundation’ & by the ‘Guardian Project’. Its primary aim is to help investigative journalists & human rights advocates do their works by providing them with a cheap, effective means of securing their privacy. But outside of journos, anyone can use it, & you may want to give it a go yourself.

A lot of surveillance & security apps are already available for your smartphone, but where other apps only make use of your phone’s camera and mike, Haven uses all of your camera’s sensors. It lets you pick & choose what you want the app to detect so that you can hide the camera away & for example, have it just detect sound & vibrations.

According to Haven’s Website, you have the choice of monitoring the following sensors & events:

  • Accelerometer: phone’s motion & vibration
  • Camera: motion in the phone’s visible surroundings from front or back camera
  • Microphone: noises in the environment
  • Light: change in light from ambient light sensor
  • Power: detect device being unplugged or power loss

Whenever Haven detects a “reportable” event, it gives you a push notification, logs it & you get access remotely to the event log, so you can look through everything that’s been happening. Notifications are sent either via SMS or Signal (with end-to-end encryption). Event logs can be remotely accessed through the encrypted/anonymous Tor Onion Service.

Click here to download Haven on your Android device.

 

– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –  

 

 
Image Credit: Haven

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