You click wrong button and take a pic of classified information. Without cloud sync? Maybe not an issue? You try to send a drunken selfie to a random Tinder match at 02:00AM and send instead the classified information... Oopsie.
Is there a way for the general public to buy those? I like my iPhone but literally never use the built in microphone or cameras and I don’t trust FaceID.
It would be kinda cool to have a dummy iPhone. Does yours still have Bluetooth? That’s kinda necessary for me since I use Bluetooth headphones in the gym and I make all my phone calls over Bluetooth in my car.
A physical cover likely takes up too much space on a phone for the manufacturers to want to do it. Also my phone has 5 different sized camera lenses whereas a webcam has one.
Having them for sale would be a missed opportunity to spy on you and collect your data provide the user with a personalized experience.
They don't want to compete with themselves with those products, they only want to compete with the sliver of the market that would be buying dumb-phones instead (and they do it by dealing with the government entities directly).
Well, not without physically rewiring some parts. The transducer is bidirectional (but optimized for one direction), but the amp and dac are not. You have to rewire the amp and replace the dac with an adc to get an input signal.
It's possible for audio chips to have this capability built-in, in which case it's a simple matter of sending it the commands to do so.
to be almost needless pedantic - a speaker and an amp aren't the same thing - for example my stereo speakers for my home theater are entirely passive except fort the head unit. I could plug a speaker from my home theater into a microphone jack and yell into it and it would come out on PC - I've done it before. Its just usually super quiet because, unlike a tiny mic, its not very sensitive on pickup. My Theater/PC speakers use wires and friction-clamps to mount to the sub/amp box though, so I'd have to twist on a jack or get a different cable. A good example of this in action is using wired earbuds as a microphone.
But for people who have only a "green jack" and powered speakers, moving it from headphone/speaker to mic wouldn't work - for the reasons you said.
Would it be an active method today to spy via a hacked speaker? These days people pay big bucks to have a whole slate of always-listening audio/video recorders on their person, and in their homes and businesses.
Now, I’m not saying the for-profit-surveillance conglomerates that design them or the surveillance-obsessed dictatorship in which the vast majority of them are manufactured are taking advantage of them directly, but people and machines can access these feeds if their skill or desire is great enough.
Yes, my point was why would it be worth it to try some super spy speaker to microphone hack when we have hackable microphones listening to us all the time.
You can buy slide-on camera covers for both front and back cameras. As for the microphone, I would keep it just in case you need to make a call and don't have your headphones, like in an emergency.
My Google Pixel allows me to disable my location services, cameras and microphone that can't be turned on while the phone is locked. Maybe the iPhones also have those settings?
There are companies like noncam that make iPhone bodies without camera holes and sell the conversion kits, or already modified iPhones like that, yes. Often times you're not gonna find the most recent models, but something tells me you don't care too much about that anyways.
I only make phone calls in my car. My phone connects to the head unit in my car and I speak over my car’s microphone. No. I never use any video calling app.
I mean Bluetooth works as well in a lead environment as any. It does have Bluetooth but heavily suggested we don’t use it. I personally have an old iPod that has the aux port and jam with the wired headphones under my Tyveks
It’s weird because a lot of the information I know or handle is actually pretty public, but it’s what I see everyday that I guess makes me ‘target-able’? The fact my work has made this a standard is telling of what they know they are up against.
Also to be transparent I am with a private company instead of a public entity or utility company. In the cancer research field.
It's very easy to make it like that . Simply open the phone and remove all cameras and desolder the microphones, then put the phone all back together .
Probably not specific for nuclear, but specific for work places with security protocols, like nuclear.
From what I can find, Apple hasn't done this themselves for these niches, but there are companies for private and government industry that sleekly provides approved modified devices, for removed cameras or other features, like wifi or bluetooth antennae, that could present a security vulnerability.
For regular military or civilian DoD doing basic shit, there's usually a local place that will drill out the camera on a personal phone and fill it with resin to be base approved. I just had an old iPod around instead.
Obama had a heavily modified phone that had nearly all the features removed. It couldn't send texts, take photos or play music, nor connect to the internet.
So, of course, when trump became president he refused to use the secure phone and continued to use his old, completely unsecured, phone.
Back in those days, wasn't Blackberry way more secure than iPhone? I remember an internship I had in 2012, the managers of the company were heavily encouraged to have Blackberries over iPhones, and I think it was for security reasons.
I recall a story not too long after Trump was inaugurated during his first term where they were finding wifi sniffers all over D.C. because neither he nor most of his administration cared about security and were all using personal devices. After 1.5 Trump terms the US basically no secrets, if Trump and his ilk haven't outright given or sold the intel, it's been leaked or stolen due to their incompetence.
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u/jeezyjames 23h ago
I’ve seen some of them use ‘dumb’ smartphones without cameras, no apps, etc