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Comment by gagabity | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that they remove the camera and mic.

Camera, built-in mic and accelerometer are the first and most important bits you want to lose.

Right, now imagine you are the NSA. And you have access to tons of android devices. If you filter out those which surprisingly don't seem to have these parts - now these are interesting for sure.

Feature phones that run android will lack an accelerometer, might lack a camera, but any phone without a microphone would certainly be strange.

Nonetheless, there's nothing preventing a system bus from reporting that a virtual device exists, even if there's no physical hardware to match. Besides, as soon as you plug a headset into the audio jack, the microphone becomes available.

You can reason about what kind of device is this and in general basically look for statistical patterns. Which is what they seem to be pretty good at. If you have modified device then it's likely that you are an outlier.

I doubt all devices are constantly reporting their capabilities to the NSA so they can look for outliers.

Well I'm only thinking for a few seconds before writing a comment and they have some pretty smart heads working full time, but you could imagine compromising infrastructure of some popular app and adding your shiny bits there. The famous black box of radio also has some pretty decent hardware access. Gemalto sim cards hack etc.

When you help with some specific operation like drug trafficking you can probably limit amount of devices that you need to monitor by location. Then maybe deploy some zero cheaper zerodays there (or fivehundreddays, not everybody cares about the updates).

I agree that this is kind of paranoid talk. Maybe removing these parts does indeed help. If it does though, then I definitely wouldn't want to provide info about these modifications to the press.

Why accelerometer?

Perhaps https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/tracking_peop...

Well, there's my daily dose of dystopia... Ugh. The future sucks.

That said, location can be derived from cell towers data if they somehow know what phone you have anyway. Can't beat a nation state at that game

The only way to not be tracked is to not use a network (cellular or otherwise).

It's what I'd like removed from my phone, to be honest.

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