Every now and then we get asked by friends or customers how SilentPocket can benefit them in their lives. The short answer is that a SilentPocket product lets you take back control over when your data can be accessed. You determine when and where your GPS signal can be tracked or when your RFID chip is exposed and scannable. The goal of today’s blog is to take a lawyer and look at the ways that they might use SilentPocket. If you want to know how SilentPocket fits into your life, feel free to reach out to us on twitter, facebook, email, or in the comments below.

Everything a lawyer does is private and confidential. If it wasn’t, you probably wouldn’t be comfortable discussing your finances, future plans, or current problems with them. So protecting that privacy is a big priority for the lawyer. When it comes to protecting physical copies of documents and legal forms, it’s pretty straight forward. Locked file cabinets and shredding discarded documents will cover you pretty well. However, legal documents don’t just come on paper anymore. Copies of documents can be made into Word Documents, PDFs, or any other file type. By being digital you can easily share these documents between yourself and your client. This means that revisions can be emailed back and forth instead of constantly scheduling meetings in person or over the phone. However, a digital copy is much easier to steal, and unlike a piece of paper, you don’t know when it’s been stolen. An email to or from your phone can be snagged by hackers in a variety of ways. The most popular is through free unprotected wireless networks in public places like coffee shops or airports. Any email sent to or from your phone while connected to these networks can be copied. You won’t even know it’s happened because the recipient still gets the email. Many phones automatically search for open wireless networks to connect to, and with this connection a hacker can gain access to your phones emails and contacts. The last thing you want as a lawyer is someone contacting your clients and using information they found in your emails to trick and scam your clients into sending money, or revealing personal details they can sell to 3rd parties. By using a SilentPocket® cell phone case your device becomes unhackable. Nobody can connect to your device while it’s in the case and you can relax knowing that your files are on hand and secure.

Beyond offering security for your data, SilentPocket® has another added benefit. When sitting down and meeting with your clients you want to convey the utmost professionalism. Having your phone ring or notify you of a new email is rude and shows your client you aren’t 100% focused on them. So when you’ve got a meeting, you simply put your phone inside a SilentPocket® case and you’re done. While inside no phone calls, texts, or emails will reach your phone. This ensures that all your attention is on the client in front of you. 

Awhile back we took a look at both sides of GPS tracking. We saw that it can be used for a variety of beneficial activities like finding your location on a map to help you navigate to a specific destination. However, the same technology that allows you to track yourself can allow others to track you. So in today’s closer look we are going to checkout ways your phone may be tracked, who might be tracking you, and how to protect yourself.

Probably the most common way that your phones location can be tracked by someone else is if an app that has been installed is transmitting your location. Some apps may just require your location to help provide relevant local content, such as an app that suggests restaurants. It wouldn’t be a very useful app if all the suggestions were miles and miles away, so it takes your GPS location to give find options that are close to you. While it is important for you to know which apps are requesting your location, and determine yourself if you are comfortable with a company knowing your location at all times, we are more interested in apps that are specifically for tracking your location and allowing it to be viewed by others.

One such tracking software is ePhoneTracker. This software can be installed on any phone and runs invisibly in the background as long as the phone is on. It won’t even show up in the running applications menu of your phone! Once on your phone the app tracks everything your phone does. Text messages, call history, emails sent and received, what websites you visit, your contacts, and your gps location, all get logged and sent to an email address to be viewed remotely. Software like this can be used in a few different ways and we are going to focus on the GPS tracking capability. Parents might use it to track their children’s location to make sure they get to school safely or that they aren’t talking to anyone they shouldn’t be. For parents of young kids I can see this being used as a tool to ensure safety more than an invasion of privacy. But the difference between monitoring for safety concerns and spying is a fine line. At what age does tracking your kids phone become spying? If you are just keeping track of a person’s location to make sure they are safe why does the app need to be so hidden? If you wanted to keep track of your spouse’s location while they were away on a business trip or commuting to work you could use one of many other more transparent methods of keeping tabs of their location. There are many other apps for keeping tabs on someone’s whereabouts without being sneaky about it.

An app like ePhoneTracker takes GPS location from a safety tool to a spying method. If you are tracking someone without their knowledge it’s because you don’t trust them to tell you where they are. Maybe you think your teenager isn’t actually going to a friend’s house, or the library like they said they were. Maybe you think your spouse isn’t being faithful and you want to know the truth. Just because you suspect someone of wrongdoing you don’t have the right to invade their privacy. Would you want someone spying on you?

GPS isn’t the only way to track a phones location. Service providers are constantly receiving location updates from your phone for the purpose of delivering phone calls and other data. Most carriers offer a family locator service that can be used to follow the location of any phone on the family plan. Connecting to open wifi networks will update your phones location, even if you don’t have GPS or a data plan.