NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden recently released a new Android app named — Haven — to protect your personal spaces and possessions without compromising privacy.
Haven is an open source project developed by Snowden, The Guardian Project and Freedom Of The Press to aid investigative journalists, human rights defenders, and people at risk of forced disappearance to create a new kind of herd immunity. Snowden who remains exiled in Russia previously developed an exclusive iPhone case designed to alert the user if and when the phone’s radio signals are turned on.
With Haven, you can turn your old Android phone into a surveillance system without worrying about compromising privacy. The app leverages on-device sensors to provide monitoring and turns any Android device into a motion, sound, vibration and light detector. When comes to privacy, Haven uses world’s most secure communications technologies, like Signal and Tor, to communicate anonymously over computer networks.
Haven uses following sensors to watch unexpected guests and unwanted intruders and send alerts via SMS, Signal or to a Tor-based website.:
- Accelerometer: phone’s motion and 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
For now, Haven only works with Android platform because anyone can purchase an inexpensive Android phone for less than $100 and use that as your “Haven Device”. And if you run Signal app on your iPhone then you can configure Haven on Android to send encrypted notifications, with photos and audio, directly to iPhone and also can remotely access all Haven log data from your iPhone, using the Onion Browser app by simply enabling the “Tor Onion Service” feature in Haven. But developers also guarantee an iOS version of the app in future.
You can download Haven from Google Play and open source Android app store F-Droid. And also you can grab the APK files from the Github releases page.
