4 ms·
Hopefully this would easily be detected, and the brand damage from the resultant public shaming should be enough of a deterrent. But maybe it's really well hidd
by cobbzilla 8y ago
Hopefully this would easily be detected, and the brand damage from the resultant public shaming should be enough of a deterrent. But maybe it's really well hidden and eludes detection, or people just don't care and there is no brand damage, or maybe even there's no "real" brand to damage (OEM crapware).
- close04 8y agoI’d imagine a vendor bothering to put an off switch will know that a simple teardown will show if it actually disconnects the device or just signals software to do it. The effort and expense would be for nothing. Most users would never bother to care about the off switch anyway, and the ones that do will know the truth.
- tonyarkles 8y agoEh, as someone else mentioned the soft switch, you could very easily make this teardown resistant by putting the covert power rail on an inner layer of the pcb with the switching transistor out of the way connected to vias. It’s not teardown-proof, but wouldn’t be obvious with a trivial inspection.
- close04 8y agoPerhaps but this would also remove any pretense of deniability from the manufacturer. If discovered it would just show that they went to great lengths (extra engineering effort to implement and hide) which could only be explained by the conscious decision to make it a back door and bypass it later in software. So the issue would no longer be one of ignorance (no button) but of premeditation (button with hidden bypass).
- snaky 8y agoWhat's the brand damage from the resultant public shaming of e.g. Google Nest Guard' 'hidden' microphone?
- meowface 8y agoThat's different. While still very bad, one is omission, and one is full-on deceit.
- amelius 8y agoHow meaningful is brand damage when a company has a quasi monopoly in multiple markets?
- mises 8y agoNest Guard is a monopoly? Or were you referring to something else? I also think a lot of this is completely non-essential (e.g. Nest Guard). I do not have any such "smart devices" at home, and encourage others to do the same. They provide, in my opinion, very little benefit for a great sacrifice. And all that aside, they're just too dang expensive. I don't see the point of spending $600 on a machine-learning toaster.
- macintux 8y agoI don't think we know yet.
- int_19h 8y agoI think we're still finding that out. Have you noticed the attitude towards large tech companies among the general public lately, especially those whose business models are entangled with privacy issues?