After more than 70 years the Polish Textile Research Institute has invented a patent perfect for people afraid of data theft and targeted at spies and thieves. Imagine how much easier protecting your privacy could be if your office was decorated with anti-bug wallpapers, and your smartphone stored in a case preventing from hacking it.
Such ideas were presented by the Textile Research Institute located in Łodź, Poland, that‘s working on fabrics reducing electromagnetic field. As put by professor Jadwiga Sójka-Ledakowicz, we are surrounded by electronic devices, at work, in homes, or hospitals – there is no escape.
Barrier fabrics seem to constitute a safe counterbalance in our electric era. They may be helpful for individuals but also worldwide companies, medical facilities, persons having risky professions and those working with sensitive data.
How were anti-spy fabrics created?
Scientists examined textile fabrics and covered them with tiny metallic layers made from conductive metals, their alloys or metal oxides.
Such fabric – depending on its composition – constitutes a barrier for electromagnetic field, and reduces it in frequency range from 50Hz to 2GHz.
You can see with the naked eye what sheen these layers give to the fabrics, but who would have suspected that a mobile phone with full coverage, when wrapped in this fabric, would not be available though it is less than a meter away from the person who‘s calling it?
That‘s how reducing of the magnetic field works. Think about what influence on spying mobile phones an anti-spy smartphone case may have.
Remote listening bugs would not work, but...
Imagine that a jealous wife installed a spy software on her husband‘s phone, for example SpyPhone Adroid Rec Pro.
Thanks to the SpyPhone the wife, envisioning her spouse with a strange woman in a cosy hotel room, could remotely listen to his phone‘s surroundings.
All she needs to do is turn on the microphone to call her husband from her phone (the one that monitors the app). Then she could listen to what‘s going on around him or turn on discreet recording and receive the gathered surveillance material.
Unfortunately, if the unfaithful husband had his phone in an anti-spy case, the woman could not use these options‘
Sooner or later, however, he would take the device out of it and then text messages, MMS, Messenger and Skype messages, calls history and intimate photos taken by the built-in camera would come to the hands of the wife, who would finally get proofs of her husband‘s disloyal behaviour.
How will the anti-spy fabric change the future?
Not only smartphone cases could be anti-spy, the Textile Research Institute suggested that handbags of the future could be equipped with special, anti-bug pockets for mobile phones and also antitheft places for payment cards that would reduce electromagnetic field, what would definitely prevent from copying them.
Will there be clothes with such pockets, laid with metallic, anti-bug fabrics, special places in companies to make safe phone calls or casings and screens protecting neurosurgeons and their patients from radiation during screening examinations?
The Institute announced that they have already started testing the fabrics for medical purposes.
Not only neurosurgeons want to counteract electromagnetic radiation
Professor Jadwiga Sójka-Ledakowicz reminded that electromagnetic field emitted by diagnostic equipment is harmful not only to the patients but also, and foremost, to the personnel who operates it on a daily basis.
The idea of hollow, upholstered with fabric walls seems quite tempting in the light of this innovative idea.
From fabrics that reduce radiation wallpapers could be made, but also cases and screens which would minimize the risk connected with radiation and its influence on human body which is still considerable.
The scientists have also stressed that these fabrics could reduce mutual influence of magnetic resonance devices what would maximize accurateness of examinations which is sometimes obscured.
‘Honey, we need to renovate the office‘
Anti-spy fabrics may conquer the field of interior design as every business person would definitely want to have their office equipped with anti-bug wallpaper and windows with anti-spy blinds, nevertheless if out of common-sense anxiety or paranoid thoughts.
Server rooms belonging to banks, governmental rooms with clerks sipping coffee, offices in various public institutions, conference rooms in companies and rented venues – where each square meter is free off listening bugs thanks to the use of the anti-spy fabrics‘ this invention would push their value up.
There‘s a question, whether anti-spy fabrics could replace noise generators used for having safe conversations that protect from every kind of surveillance? They effectively produce electrical noise so that the listening person only gets incomprehensible, useless recording that‘s almost impossible to decipher.
One thing is sure, pioneer inventions and the newest and most expensive gear cannot hold off treacherous people with long tongues.