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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

At least you can be aware your data is logged.

The other company uses their marketing to pretend it isn't.

If I need to have a private conversation, we leave phones in the house and go for a walk. I havent had the need to hide my location, but I'd do the same.

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There is an amusingly high level of irony in going out in public for a private conversation. :D

Granted, I also don't have the same level of concern that is being expressed here. Nor the level of fear that my phone is always listening. Seems rather unlikely, all told. Unless I'm the target of an investigation or the victim of a stalker. In both cases, I'm far more likely to have active threats against my privacy than a passive phone of my own.

Are you that worried about the yellow dot (on iOS) or equivalent on Android being overriden to hide microphone use?

Edit: Apparently people disliked my phrasing. Before Apple added the yellow dot to indicate the microphone was live I was far more sensitive to leaving phones behind. Now, I've relaxed somewhat. Absent concerns about intelligence service level eavesdroppers (which is a real concern for some situations), is there really still a threat there?

Depends on how sure you want to be that nobody is listening, it's not necessary for the yellow dot to be overridden, maybe the attacker is using the accelerometer to act as an improvised microphone.

Do you have an example of this working, even in a pure research setting?

Sorry, this is absolutely not a thing. You’d have something if you said that someone could use the speaker as a mic, although of course you can’t do that on a phone without taking it apart. But the accelerometer on a phone, while in the phone, cannot be used as a microphone. I’d be very very impressed if someone managed to get usable sound out of an accelerometer floating in free space even, although that’s mildly conceivable. And while I hate to appeal to authority, I worked at Fitbit for 7 years and was directly responsible for the algorithms team that built the step counting, activity recognition and other algorithms for a chunk of that time. I’m very familiar with what the data off an accelerometer looks like and what you can train a model to extract from it.

Reading your message it hit me how trivial it is to not take the phone with me for a minute, and yet how incredibly far I was from thinking of it on my own.

Leaving your phone behind in daily life is less than trivial.

* My car insurance is currently only on my phone, and the printed cards in my glovebox are years out of date. I cannot drive.

* If your car has LTE or 5G you should not use it. Those will leak location data.

* It's almost moot if you do a transaction with a credit card. You need to use cash to not leak data. It would be a signal if you only take cash out of an ATM once in a blue moon. Many 'sensitive' transactions, such as medical care, can generate paper trails.

* In some cities it's moot due to the large number of cameras with facial recognition. In fact, to someone that has both phone data and city facial recognition data the fact that you don't have your phone could be used as a signal for closer investigation.

* If there is an emergency, such as you are arrested, or there is a medical emergency in which you need to go to the hospital, do you have a contact's phone number memorized?

> there is a medical emergency in which you need to go to the hospital, do you have a contact's phone number memorized?

Yes. 911.

> * My car insurance is currently only on my phone, and the printed cards in my glovebox are years out of date. I cannot drive.

Not sure if this is the norm elsewhere, but in Georgia police don't always ask for your insurance card anymore because they're able to lookup your insurance information when they run your tag.

In the state I am in the police are able to lookup your insurance information, but it is still against regulation to drive without your insurance documentation.

AFAIK, Georgia still requires you to have a paper copy in the car even though cops can verify off the tag.

I was used to this too and got pulled over in Utah and ticketed because Utah can’t do that, my insurance card is in an app not saved to my phone, and we were in a desert with no signal.

That Utah cop was a jerk. Now I have a pdf on my phone’s drive and a print out in the glovebox.

I’m absolutely not defending misrepresentation and dubious marketing. However, if a company is not known for having that information, it’s less likely that a judge will know they can share it, and therefore compel them to hand it over. I’d be very surprised if a Google representative could get away with pretending they hadn’t heard of that Google Maps feature when a law enforcement officer mentions they’ve asked for it hundreds of times.

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