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Your Phone Can Be Snooped On Using Its Gyroscope

Posted by Unknown on from the phone-can-be-snooped-on-by-everything dept.

stephendavion (2872091) writes Researchers will demonstrate the process used to spy on smartphones using gyroscopes at Usenix Security event on August 22, 2014. Researchers from Stanford and a defense research group at Rafael will demonstrate a way to spy on smartphones using gyroscopes at Usenix Security event on August 22, 2014. According to the "Gyrophone: Recognizing Speech From Gyroscope Signals" study, the gyroscopes integrated into smartphones were sensitive enough to enable some sound waves to be picked up, transforming them into crude microphones.

3 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. I give up... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Can we just succumb to the inevitable and work on building a list of the parts of a smartphone that can't be used to spy on you?

    I'm thinking 'maybe the battery door'. Any other suggestions?

    1. Re:I give up... by geekmux · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Can we just succumb to the inevitable and work on building a list of the parts of a smartphone that can't be used to spy on you? I'm thinking 'maybe the battery door'. Any other suggestions?

      What's the point of securing any smartphone when all of your activity on the device is captured elsewhere and sold for profit? They don't just count how many times you play your songs. They count how many times you text during the day. They count how many times you click on icons. They count how many seconds you hover over app icons even when you don't buy them in order to market apps catered to your "maybe" whims. Yes, they do this shit. No, it's not called crazy, it's called statistical analysis to the nth degree in order to maximize profits.

      The phone is merely the vehicle. What that vehicle can do all depends on the driver. Unfortunately, we've all been thrown in the back of a telco cab and the driver was told to get lost years ago.

  2. The paper says... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    They are currently able to recognize the spoken digits 1-9 correctly approximately 80% of the time. This is given a training data set from the same speaker and the same phone. Incredibly impressive, especially since it was done from a web browser and requires no special permissions or even knowledge from the user. For those of you that didn't read it. However, James Bond spy tool this is not yet...