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Comment by callmeal | Hacker News Reader

>Imagine if you bought a car from somebody, and they secretly kept a spare key and periodically used your car to run their personal errand.

It's worse than that. It's like you bought a house from somebody and they secretly left cameras all over the living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen so they can get 'telemetry' ostensibly to improve the next house they build, for 'safety' in case there's an accident, and to 'protect the children'.

I think people are so overwhelmed and anxious that there's no space for fighting back against this kind of over-reach. And even if you did have the time and space and energy, how would you even go about it?

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So it's like buying a Tesla

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

But worse, it's like being required to own a Tesla because it's the only car available.

And the cameras being integrated so the driving would break if you'd neutralize them.

And the laws are written such that replacing the software responsible for sending the camera feeds back to Tesla with a FOSS equivalent is illegal, because you're less trusted than the spying psychopathic corporation.

And such people are ridiculed in the news.

You can still drive it. You can’t use autopilot thought

You're responding in literal terms about a Tesla to an analogy about the Qualcomm 5G chips

> the covert operating system (AMSS) has complete control over the hardware, microphone and camera. The Linux kernel and deGoogled /e/OS end-user operating system function as a slave on top of the hidden AMSS operating system

So they can also exfiltrate audio and video

This is why Snowden removes the microphone from his phones.

Wait a minute: how does it function as a good ol' phone?

He attaches a USB microphone.

Also, it doesn't have to be USB on devices with 3.5 4-pin jack.

me too, and i also remove the camera[s], and put a dab of urethane over the hole. if i know there is an accelerometer i cut Voltage, and shunt it to ground

Good for you. There are so many examples of cameras on internet-connected devices being used to blackmail people, and criminals are pretty creative, so they'll keep thinking of other nefarious things to do in the future.

What’s the privacy issue with accelerometer?

> Drawing from existing literature, we found that accelerometer data alone may be sufficient to obtain information about a device holder's location, activities, health condition, body features, gender, age, personality traits, and emotional state. Acceleration signals can even be used to uniquely identify a person based on biometric movement patterns and to reconstruct sequences of text entered into a device, including passwords.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3309074.3309076

One I could think of is you could use accelerometer data to know if the phone is moving, and how: is it just being lifted and interacted with, is the user walking or running, are they in a car.

For a high profile target you might also be able to track their approximate location if you know their starting point and their acceleration profile - speed up, slow down, turns, time taken. Enough, at least, to execute an ambush.

With enough data and a high SNR, you don't even need the starting point or the velocity profile. Just the turns and distances are enough in combination with a map to uniquely identify most journeys. The problem with applying that more globally is sensor drift.

There was a research in 2011 about using the accelerometer to log your keystrokes https://www.extremetech.com/internet/92946-a-wiggly-approach...

Because it can be used to roughly track location through 3D space. It's nowhere near as accurate as practically any other method but for "good enough" a lot of the time it'll do the job.

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