Some people at MIT recently came up with a way to record audio from film of things like plastic bags or plants's vibrations: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5

Some people at MIT recently came up with a way to record audio from film of things like plastic bags or plants's vibrations: http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5968243/mit-turns-recorded-vibrations-back-into-speech-and-music http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/4/5968243/mit-turns-recorded-... Pretty crazy... the one thing about the age of computers is that things like cameras, microphones, internet communication, gps dots and various other sensors are becoming as cheap as a restaurant meal... That's pretty scary to me. Imagine in 1980 you could hire a private detective for $5 who would give you film, sound and location of an individual for days or months, and it'd be very unlikely that this detective was ever caught and traced back to you, and these detectives were widely available. That's sort of the future we're slowly approaching. We fear and criticise state surveillance, but the potential abuse of non-state actors is probably going to rapidly rise.