Holy **** your phone has a few tiny mics hidden inside

I would have thought us video and audio folk would have known the reason for this - and as far as I was aware, there have been multiple mics in phones for years, because they are pretty important. even more important now that so many people use hands free. We use zoom and the others and expect voice cancellation but in phones it really helps to be able to do the clever processing to predict where a sound sources is, cancel others and make communications clearer. I've got one of those brick type rubber housings for mine, that has two small openings at the base and I cannot use my ring doorbell properly because the phone cancels me out!

I thought this was well know - the conspiracy stories just make me smile!
 
paulears said:
I would have thought us video and audio folk would have known the reason for this - and as far as I was aware, there have been multiple mics in phones for years, because they are pretty important. even more important now that so many people use hands free. We use zoom and the others and expect voice cancellation but in phones it really helps to be able to do the clever processing to predict where a sound sources is, cancel others and make communications clearer. I've got one of those brick type rubber housings for mine, that has two small openings at the base and I cannot use my ring doorbell properly because the phone cancels me out!

I thought this was well know - the conspiracy stories just make me smile!
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Why would they put those mics on the motherboard?
 
The iPhones and Android phones are a magnificent bit of engineering. Things can quickly be clouded for casual observer. Hidden microphones? Yikes! Let's scare everybody with nonsense! Why would they put in hidden microphone?

If you are a developer of apps for these devices, you read the developer's notes provided by the manufacturers and things become more clear. https://developer.apple.com/document...in_microphones

A snippet from that paper: "An iOS device’s built-in microphone input consists of an array of physical microphones and beamformers, each represented as an instance of AVAudioSessionDataSourceDescription." It goes on to explain how to use them and provides sample code for doing some cool stuff, ,,,,including spying on people ... psych! Think about it. Any app you download asks for permission to devices on your phone. When you give that permission, all bets are off. You've given them permission to do pretty much anything without you knowing about it.

Meanwhile, your TV has a microphone, Alexa is listening continuously, the phone and TV can watch you all day long. If you want to worry about something, consider baby monitors - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...are-vulnerable
 
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WWII U-boats had an underwater microphone array that could pick up the sound of convoys from 60 miles away. They had Edward Snowden on tape way back then.
 
On a technology-related note, I read today Home Depot is using Bluetooth to fight increased theft.

They have it inside some tools (probably many more products in the future) that renders the device not operable until it's scanned at the register at checkout.

I guess that's a good use of "crippling" features.
 
When one is blessed to live a long life under mostly very different circumstances, sometimes it's just better to be naive.

And I wholeheartedly mean that...it is a much easier life. The desire for simpler times will always exist.

But the question should never be why anyone would put hidden or unhidden (depending on your perspective) microphones in a phone; but it should be why wouldn't they?
 
I dare say that it's more concerning if the camera on people's laptops, pads and phones was active when the little light wasn't on? Paranoid people get more paranoid. Others don't care a sh*t if Alexa listens to everything. Privacy is only concerning when it's NOT private. I'm more worried that our Health Service intend selling medical data. We've been promised it's anonymised, but if some poor devil has both legs chopped off and has finger missing - it's pretty easy to spot him in a crowd.
 
Paul F said:
The iPhones and Android phones are a magnificent bit of engineering. Things can quickly be clouded for casual observer. Hidden microphones? Yikes! Let's scare everybody with nonsense! Why would they put in hidden microphone?

If you are a developer of apps for these devices, you read the developer's notes provided by the manufacturers and things become more clear. https://developer.apple.com/document...in_microphones

A snippet from that paper: "An iOS device’s built-in microphone input consists of an array of physical microphones and beamformers, each represented as an instance of AVAudioSessionDataSourceDescription." It goes on to explain how to use them and provides sample code for doing some cool stuff, ,,,,including spying on people ... psych! Think about it. Any app you download asks for permission to devices on your phone. When you give that permission, all bets are off. You've given them permission to do pretty much anything without you knowing about it.

Meanwhile, your TV has a microphone, Alexa is listening continuously, the phone and TV can watch you all day long. If you want to worry about something, consider baby monitors - https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...are-vulnerable
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I don't think those referenced mics are the same thing. Snowden claims that the circled parts below are microphones. (I can't tell that they are by looking, so I'm taking his word for it.) These seem like crappy places to put microphones, so I would think that the reason to have them there is that they are difficult to discover and disable.

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But the bulk of Snowden's article was about the availability of phone hacking as a commercial service. The hidden phone mics was just the part that felt more personal to me.
 
paulears said:
I dare say that it's more concerning if the camera on people's laptops, pads and phones was active when the little light wasn't on? Paranoid people get more paranoid. Others don't care a sh*t if Alexa listens to everything. Privacy is only concerning when it's NOT private. I'm more worried that our Health Service intend selling medical data. We've been promised it's anonymised, but if some poor devil has both legs chopped off and has finger missing - it's pretty easy to spot him in a crowd.
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Well yes, hackers can trigger recordings on your phone without any indicators.

I personally am not a political target of anyone and I don't harbor industrial trade secrets. So I'm not immediately concerned about any of this. But we're sleepwalking into an increasingly vulnerable state where it's easier than ever for bad actors to exert control on us individually or on our social/political sphere
 
ahalpert said:
I don't think those referenced mics are the same thing. Snowden claims that the circled parts below are microphones. (I can't tell that they are by looking, so I'm taking his word for it.) These seem like crappy places to put microphones, so I would think that the reason to have them there is that they are difficult to discover and disable.



But the bulk of Snowden's article was about the availability of phone hacking as a commercial service. The hidden phone mics was just the part that felt more personal to me.
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When a new phone comes out, there are people who relish opening them up and dissect them to find out every bit of what goes on inside. Then there are the independent repair people who not only get the schematics from Apple (due to right to repair laws), but get to know every nuance of every Apple product. Nothing is hidden.
 
ahalpert said:
We are living in the worst possible timeline
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Between this time and the one where dissenters were subject to all sorts of fantastically inventive unthinkable tortures (my latest morbid fascination: the Penalty of the Sack)--I'd still go with this one.
 
Paul F said:
When a new phone comes out, there are people who relish opening them up and dissect them to find out every bit of what goes on inside. Then there are the independent repair people who not only get the schematics from Apple (due to right to repair laws), but get to know every nuance of every Apple product. Nothing is hidden.
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It's possible that I mistook Snowden... he could have meant hidden as in hard to find rather than hidden as in secret. Perhaps he was just making a demonstration to laymen about the technological power and complexity of a phone.

It had little to do with the main topic of the article, which was about how blue chip companies are involved in selling phone hacking as a service and the harm that has come from it.
 
CharlesPapert said:
Between this time and the one where dissenters were subject to all sorts of fantastically inventive unthinkable tortures (my latest morbid fascination: the Penalty of the Sack)--I'd still go with this one.
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But wasn't that the same timeline, just a different part of it, thus proving my point? I'm talking about alternate universes, or "parallel worlds" as Michio Kaku calls them. Supposedly there's some good stuff on the new Loki series about this
 
ahalpert said:
We are living in the worst possible timeline
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C'mon now. I know we live in a world that forgot how to use anything but superlatives. But still, I have to agree with Charles. We have it absolutely friggin' fantastic. Have a look back at 1917-1918, 1929-1939, 1941-1945, 1962, 1963, the cold war. Go back further in time and it gets much, much worse.
 
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