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Wouldn't it be possible to detect this? If this is happening then it must require some amount of CPU and memory use on the device, which even if hidden from th
by api 9y ago
Wouldn't it be possible to detect this?
If this is happening then it must require some amount of CPU and memory use on the device, which even if hidden from the OS can be detected via power use and heat dissipation. It should be possible to indirectly measure a phone's CPU load (including any hidden processors) by filming it in the infrared and/or by attaching it to power and measuring the wattage consumed from the supply.
If this is happening it must also require some network I/O. Something must be phoning home and reporting the data if the data is to be useful.
Note that there is an intrinsic trade-off between the heat dissipation angle and the bandwidth angle. If the device is doing parsing, speech recognition, AI, etc. locally then it must be consuming more energy and dissipating more heat. If the device does these things remotely it must upload more data. Compressed audio is far more bandwidth intensive than digested meta-data.
This seems like something security researchers can and should look into.
- smashingfiasco 9y agoRemember the time they kept the app open in the background on iOS devices by sending an empty audio buffer to the phone for playback? People started discovering that after iOS introduced the battery/power usage section in the Settings app.
- dlubarov 9y agoWouldn't it be easier to reverse engineer their app? It seems easy enough, at least one the Android side. You could use something like baksmali to convert all the dex code to smali, then grep that for calls to AudioRecord/MediaRecorder and figure out what triggers that code. That's why I'm skeptical that Facebook would do this -- it seems like a terrible business decision given the high chance of getting caught, either by reverse engineering or a whistleblower.