Comment by ThinkBeat
2 months ago
At the time I am typing this, the title on the page is:
""Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing""
Which is presently also the title on this post.
Then as I read it becomes clear that it is merely focusing on Facebook.
However the confusion that may stem from "Your phone isn’t secretly listening to you"
The blog post never attempts to establish that your phone is not listening to you, just that some companies may not be going it.
The truth is that your phone may well be listening to you . There is plenty of malware / spywear that uses exploits to achieve it.
Like the NSO group¹.
Tools to do so can be bouught on the malware market from other sources as well and we must assume that Mossad, NSA, and other major intellitence agencies have tools that exceed what you can buy on the open market.
You phone may aboslutely be listening to you. but probably it is not.
¹
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pegasus-spyware https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphon...
https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversa...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-24/nso-group...
In aggregate, your phone is not listening to you, but if you are of great interest to a powerful adversary, it very well might be. But at that point, I would wager that's one of the smaller things on your plate.
Phones today show in the status bar if the camera/microphone is active.
If you can’t trust the software, why would you trust the software? Am I supposed to rely on the hope that an attacker can take over some part of the OS, but not the one rendering a tiny blob in the status bar?
Apple has moved these indicators into their “exclaves” removing any control or influence from the OS / software running.
6 replies →
I think Snowden worked with someone to create a bulky, apparatus that you could put your iphone into and it would measure if any signals at all were coming from it.
Does that mean the phone will not react to „Hey, Siri“ without a mic icon showing up in the status bar?
“Hey Siri” is activated by the mic, which is always listening, but only for the key phrase. It’s not going through the OS in the traditional sense, hence the “light” only comes on when it starts to listen through the OS.
As an Android user I think there's no way for Google to assist unless directly called upon.
And you think that wouldnt be disabled by malware that can turn your microphone on at will? Lmfao
That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.
Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it