Safety and privacy

Keep personal things off the phone

A hosted phone is used by other people. Before hosting:

• reset it and don’t sign in to your personal accounts;
• don’t restore your apps, photos or messages;
• take out the SIM card.

What renters get

Developers get access to one phone, through PocketShare, only while their rental is active: they can install and debug their own apps and see and control the screen. When the rental ends, the hub cuts access, wipes the phone and checks it against its starting state. A phone that can’t be confirmed clean stays offline until it’s sorted out.

What renters don’t get

• Your hub computer or other devices on your home network. Rented phones are planned to reach the internet through PocketShare rather than through your network.
• Your SIM card, phone number, texts or calls.
• Root access, or anything that lasts beyond their rental.

Your hub

• Use a computer dedicated to hosting.
• Don’t open ports or share the hub remotely. It only connects out to PocketShare.
• On Windows, keep Windows Defender Firewall on for Public networks. A phone switched to USB tethering shows up as a new Public network, and the firewall keeps it out of your PC. (On Linux, the hub’s package keeps hosted phones’ USB network connections switched off.)
• Install only official PocketShare downloads, and check their published checksums and signatures.

Honest limits

• Anyone physically holding a phone can see its screen. A hosted phone isn’t a private device for you or for renters.
• Wiping between rentals is designed for test use. It isn’t forensic erasure.
• The protections above are being built and must pass testing on real phones before hosting opens.

Questions or concerns? Email [email protected]. Hosting is covered by the host agreement; the privacy notice explains how PocketShare handles your data, including hub health reports and diagnostics bundles.