4 ms·
Are you that worried about the yellow dot (on iOS) or equivalent on Android being overriden to hide microphone use? Edit: Apparently people disliked my phrasin
by HWR_14 4y ago
Are you that worried about the yellow dot (on iOS) or equivalent on Android being overriden to hide microphone use?
Edit: Apparently people disliked my phrasing. Before Apple added the yellow dot to indicate the microphone was live I was far more sensitive to leaving phones behind. Now, I've relaxed somewhat. Absent concerns about intelligence service level eavesdroppers (which is a real concern for some situations), is there really still a threat there?
- vhcr 4y agoDepends on how sure you want to be that nobody is listening, it's not necessary for the yellow dot to be overridden, maybe the attacker is using the accelerometer to act as an improvised microphone.
- callalex 4y agoDo you have an example of this working, even in a pure research setting?
- sulam 4y agoSorry, this is absolutely not a thing. You’d have something if you said that someone could use the speaker as a mic, although of course you can’t do that on a phone without taking it apart. But the accelerometer on a phone, while in the phone, cannot be used as a microphone. I’d be very very impressed if someone managed to get usable sound out of an accelerometer floating in free space even, although that’s mildly conceivable. And while I hate to appeal to authority, I worked at Fitbit for 7 years and was directly responsible for the algorithms team that built the step counting, activity recognition and other algorithms for a chunk of that time. I’m very familiar with what the data off an accelerometer looks like and what you can train a model to extract from it.