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I don't think it's easy to not carry a phone, nowadays. Let's say I'm meeting up with someone: I'll need to use navigation, potentially message them if I'm runn

by twiss 1y ago

I don't think it's easy to not carry a phone, nowadays. Let's say I'm meeting up with someone: I'll need to use navigation, potentially message them if I'm running late, and so on. Then once I'm there, what do I do with the phone? Ask to put it in a separate room and hope that the microphone isn't powerful enough to pick up our conversation? I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency? For me, as a user, the easiest solution would be to have a killswitch. I understand that building it would be more work, of course :)

mkayokay 1y ago
> Ask to put it in a separate room... Yes, that's what I had to do for meetings that the organizer thought were important enough. Also, in very sensitive areas special rooms with anti-eavesdropping gear are common [1]. > I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency? But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;) Don't get me wrong, I think a killswitch can make a lot of sense for highly sensitive areas (R&D, politics, military, ...), but I don't think Fairphone 6 are the devices that target this demographic and thus should not include one. Furthermore, current "offline" measure seem to mitigate the problem okay enough to not need such a killswitch - else we would already have phones with such features. And lastly, killswitches can only mitigate parts of the features modern spyware [2] implements and does not protect from simple human-based errors like the United States government group chat leaks [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_information_facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group_chat_leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...
- twiss 1y ago
  > But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;) I would be, because I asked for a killswitch for the microphone and cameras, not a killswitch for connectivity like the original comment. If I get a call while the killswitch is active, I can stop the sensitive conversation, turn on the microphone, and answer the call.
deleted 1y ago
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by twiss 1y ago

mkayokay 1y ago

> Ask to put it in a separate room... Yes, that's what I had to do for meetings that the organizer thought were important enough. Also, in very sensitive areas special rooms with anti-eavesdropping gear are common [1]. > I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency? But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;) Don't get me wrong, I think a killswitch can make a lot of sense for highly sensitive areas (R&D, politics, military, ...), but I don't think Fairphone 6 are the devices that target this demographic and thus should not include one. Furthermore, current "offline" measure seem to mitigate the problem okay enough to not need such a killswitch - else we would already have phones with such features. And lastly, killswitches can only mitigate parts of the features modern spyware [2] implements and does not protect from simple human-based errors like the United States government group chat leaks [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_information_facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group_chat_leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...

twiss 1y ago
> But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;) I would be, because I asked for a killswitch for the microphone and cameras, not a killswitch for connectivity like the original comment. If I get a call while the killswitch is active, I can stop the sensitive conversation, turn on the microphone, and answer the call.

deleted 1y ago

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