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Is your smartphone listening to you?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#91

Post by Bromskloss »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #12
jimhefferon wrote: post #4

If a vendor provided a physical switch with which I could turn off the mic, that would be a feature that I at least would consider very attractive.

That's in my proposal for a secure or private phone that I drop on people trying to build one. Hopefully it will get in a successful product at some point. Need one for mic, front camera, rear camera, and radios. Might compromise to have a physical switch for mic and radios with something inside phone (eg a jumper) to turn off others. I want to be sure I can cut actual power to mic and wireless, though.

> my proposal for a secure or private phone that I drop on people trying to build one

Can we see it?

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#92

Post by williamscales »

jokoon wrote: post #86

I have a huawei $60 android which is 2 year old. I don't have a data plan nor a SIM in it, I just use it for offline openstreetmap data with OSMAND and for watching youtube video. I'm not so rich so I use a nokia candybar cell phone for my calls. I was at this park, and my battery was nearly dead. At the 20% mark, I noticed that the battery drained very quickly, and it lost 1% per 10 second. Maybe it's a battery phys…

Battery meters are nonlinear (i.e. they don't follow a straight line) in the regions close to full and close to empty. Battery level meters also tend to go out of calibration over time. I think these two factors together probably explain what you saw (as you say, a battery physics issue essentially).

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#93

Post by williamscales »

willholloway wrote: post #27

The only real answer to this with current consumer devices is to have a soundproof case for your phone. Radio connection can be kept alive, and if the case were smart it could have its own internal mic, wired to an led or speaker on the outside of the case to alert the user that the phone is ringing. It's a product I've been kicking around producing for a while now. Is there demand? Would you purchase for peace of mi…

I've thought about making something like this myself and I would definitely purchase one if it were available.

I wonder how to make an acoustically insulating phone case that is not so bulky one has to keep the phone in a bag. Acoustic insulating materials I've seen are fairly massive or have large spatial extent (or both).

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#94

Post by williamscales »

sandworm101 wrote: post #55

In defence of the BBC, they are particularly sensitive to this atm. It is not unusual for journalists in the UK to be asked to remove batteries from phones, particularly when discussing certain international matters that may interest certain people. The concept of a smartphone being turned into a listening device isn't unheard of in the UK. For whatever reason, US/Canadian journalists are more trusting. I trace this…

What do the journalists do when the battery is non-removable? Do they just leave the phones "far enough away"?

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#95

Post by williamscales »

somethingsimple wrote: post #88
smaisidoro wrote: post #14

I have to say, I'm very sceptical about all of this, but one day a friend showed me a product (some speakers that use the table surface for resonance) and the ad showed a couple of minutes after on Facebook. I started thinking on how devices can emit audio signatures for other devices around it to be aware of its presence. A couple of years after, Chromecast uses audio for authentication of nearby devices. I honestly…

I had a weird experience some time ago. I stayed with my family at a hotel and our room had an unusually shaped tap in its bathroom. I never looked it up online - in fact, I didn't even mention to anyone that I thought that was a very peculiar tap. But a few days after we came back, Amazon showed me that exact tap as a shopping suggestion. It felt a little creepy. I could see no connection between the site where I bo…

Is it possible the manufacturer of the faucets actually partners with the hotel to market the faucets and they actually pay the hotel for the guest information to show them ads? I know some hotels I've stayed at actually advertise the fittings so it doesn't seem like a great stretch.

Still deeply creepy.

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#96

Post by rdtsc »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #56
digi_owl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on my Huawei P6 i can set it to flight mode and then turn back on wifi and bluetooth. Actually i have used the thing more like a PDA than a phone, as i have a well functioning HSPA capable featurephone that i pair up if ever i need data on the go.

You mean it's a soft-switch that tells you it does that. You have no idea if the radio is actually running at any time or not. That plus their reliability issues are why I don't like soft-switches.

True, though with airplane mode they might be skirting the law as it now touches the whole interfering with FAA requirements are. Also it would seem it would be easy to verify for anyone who opens the case what the radio does.

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#97

Post by schiffern »

majewsky wrote: post #53
logicallee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google were serious about granular permissions in Android it would allow you to choose from three options: "allow", "block", "pretend to allow" for every requested permission, where the third would be described as "Your app will be given permission but will not have actual access unless you grant it." Then later you could have a pop-up "This app is requesting access to your camera. You have previously chosen to gi…

Didn't they add this to Marshmallow? So that if the app wants to access the camera roll, but you don't allow it, it just gets an empty list of images. (I might confuse this with iOS, though. Does someone have a source?)

Unfortunately these OS level privacy countermeasures are trivial to circumvent.

Instead of checking for [photo permission denied] or [camera permission denied], on supported OS versions the app can check for [empty image list] or [black camera image]. Then display the impenetrable wall, or disable the goodie, or lock out the content because it can't verify that there are N or fewer viewers, or...

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#98

Post by dredmorbius »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #74
dredmorbius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's Android permissions model, application ecosystem, and vendor partnerships are utterly and irredeemably broken.

Not from the point of view of Google's business model.

That problem can be fixed.

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#99

Post by dredmorbius »

majewsky wrote: post #52
dredmorbius wrote: post #36

As I've been suggesting increasingly on HN and elsewhere: sell me hardware without a mic. I no longer trust mobile phones at all, so I carry one virtually never. I use a tablet. It has an integrated mic and two cameras. The cameras are taped (they should have lens caps). On the rare occasions I use it for voice comms, I plug in a headset. Pervasive audio pickup is a growing problem. It's going to be all but impossibl…

On a related stance, Rob Gonggrijp and Frank Rieger of the Chaos Computer Club suggested a certification for "Guaranteed Cloud-less Objects", given the recent surge of IoT devices that spy on you, or lock you out unexpectedly because of server maintenance. Source: Video at https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7501-ten_years_after_we_lost_the...

Interesting!

Thanks.

Re: Is your smartphone listening to you?

#100

Post by dredmorbius »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #68
dredmorbius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sell a micless phone. Actually, it's a tablet, and if you want it to go into surveillance / phone mode, you plug in your own goddamend mic. Most headsets have one. Alternatively: a phone whose "off" mode is a battery eject.

Brilliant. Never even occurred to me. People often use headsets, wired or wireless, for the mic. Can just not enable audio unless one is plugged in. That's so easy to verify. Thanks for stating the obvious to my overly-complex mind. :)

:)

I've always found built-in/integrated cameras/mics to represent tremendous negative value.

1. I cannot unambiguously disable them.

2. I cannot upgrade / swap them readily for something better.

Aftermarket/detachable just seems such an obvious alternative.

And yeah, a simpler solution to a hard problem ;-)

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