Snacks to the Rescue

To offset the shockingly familiar theft of data from switched-off mobile phones at meetings, managers at a German company have adopted the practice of storing their phones in cookie tins during meetings. The company has said that it uses specifically tins in which biscuits (cookies) are delivered, thereby taking advantage of the unique electromagnetic-blocking properties of these metallic data-saviors. Yes, indeed, it's phone-in-a-tin. (We don't have any further data about what brand or thickness of biscuit, but that's probably classified anyway, or perhaps even immaterial.)

The theory is that the tins function like a Faraday cage, blocking out static electric fields like those invaded by data-thieving devices. Apparently, hackers have been able to tap into phone and email messages even while phones are switched off. Specifically, the Faraday cage redistributes the electric charges within the enclosed area, thereby making the data difficult if not impossible to track, let alone steal.

Such a device is commonly used to shield vital entities from lighting strikes and other kinds of electrostatic discharges. Not sure where phone-hacking fits in there; but if the company managers are doing it, they must have a very good reason for it. Surely they wouldn't go to all the trouble and effort of ordering the biscuit tins, eating the biscuits so the phones can be stored in a crumb-free environment, carefully switching off the phones and then storing them inside the electric cone of silence for the duration of the meeting, and then telling the world they're doing all this.

The most common Faraday cages found in everyday living are the microwave oven and the MRI machine. Let's hope that the German experiment doesn't end up somehow cooking the phones so that even the owners can't retrieve the data.