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Comment by sciencejerk | Hacker News Reader

we have routers that you can monitor traffic on

Most traffic is encrypted with HTTPS unless you can root every single device you own

we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools.

Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.

Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)

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>Most traffic is encrypted with HTTPS unless you can root every single device you own

>Complicated smartphone OS, firmware, drivers might have bugs allow overrides of visual indicators.

This line of thinking gets dangerously close to unfalsifiable territory.

If apps are eavesdropping on us, where's the network data? It's encrypted.

But you can disable https pinning by jailbreaking/rooting? The spying logic automatically disables if it detects it's jailbroken/rooted.

Where's the jailbreak/root detection logic? It's buried in 9 layers of obfuscation so you can't find it.

What about microphone indicator? They found a 0day in both Android and iOS, or the two are complicit as well.

But we don't see any backdoors in AOSP? It's built into the hardware/baseband itself.

>Companies have also been known to secretly eavesdrop and not tell users before (Apple + Siri https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-95-million-app...)

"secretly eavesdrop" implies they were intentionally doing it, when even the plaintiffs admit it wasn't intentional.

That is fair. I do not think anyone could feasibly could detect/extract the exact data sent, because of HTTPS.

However I was more thinking of simple things, such as disabling anything that SHOULD be communicating with the Internet and seeing if any constant traffic persists.

Now of course, some very small (e.g plaintext) traffic might be almost undetectable, however that would suggest that most of the data would not be able to be transmitted due to size.

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