This also happend with the hardware wifi kill switches we used to have on notebooks.
I know lots of people who have had trouble getting their wifi to work. I don't know anyone who put a piece of tape across their camera and then couldn't figure out why their camera didn't work.
If all of those people had to flip a hardware switch every time they wanted to use their phones, they'd complain about it.
What do you mean with "flip a switch for every microphone on their devices"? Why would you want to have more than one mic and one switch per device? And turning it on in hardware is way faster than in software so a hardware switch is both faster and more secure and breaking a hardware switch seems a lot less likely than custom OEM made software failing or stop getting updated. Dust and water is no problem as lots of phones already have hardware switches, including my Android phone. I really see no problem in hardware switches at all.
The ipad has 4 microphones. iPhones have at least two. They’re located in different places to either catch different sounds or implement noise canceling
Would turning on a single microphone of the array have any meaning?
Android. Also on Play Store. https://github.com/kaputnikGo/PilferShushJammer
Windows 10 app. https://appforwin10.com/pilfershush-jammer-app-for-windows-1...
It totally makes sense, and in the modern world too many people put covers on their cams for this not to be considered a valuable feature.
There used to be such flip switches for Wi-Fi, so it is not too far-fetched.
(But if Apple cares about this market, wouldn’t you expect their laptops to have a lot more security features to appease these buyers? Not necessarily. This sort of thing is pretty much “enough”—governments are used to having signals intercepted by foreign intelligence, and so they have mitigations in place, like shutting off all electronic devices before having important conversations, or creating secure rooms known to not leak emissions, and then requiring that nobody bring anything electronic into them. For non-classified but “off-the-record” conversations, the ability to say that there’s no known hardware in the room actively recording the conversation is usually “good enough.”)
I suppose I can trace that preference all the way back to being fascinated with the Star Trek: The Next Generation LCARS (Library Computer Access & Retrieval System), which (to quote the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual written by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach from teenage memory) was “expressly designed to suggest a highly simplified manner of managing vastly complicated processes” or some such.
If you really want to be sure it isn’t listening to you you can turn it off and/or leave it in another room.
I am not sure if I'd want my phone to have another button just for that though.
So we should chuck all of our electronic devices into the bin in the name of security?
Good security is sometimes better than perfect security.
Like remote targeted attack would force the roomba to sneak up on someone and bump the switch on? Otherwise, i don't see how this is a remote attack.