And this is why I have the internal microphone disconnected on my macbook pro. The only time a mike is attached is when I'm actively using it, and even then they have hardware kill switches.
Simple kill switches would be nice to see but I doubt Apple would ever implement something like that.
>I'm talking about national security level sensitive things, not your little brothers surprise birthday plans...
You added "national security level sensitive things", not the parent. There are thousands of subjects one might not want to be eavesdropped on that are not "national security level sensitive things".
Not to mention "national security level sensitive things" are not that far-fetched either. Not everybody lives a life as uniteresting as you imagine.
What about a activist or a mere vocal critic living in an opressive regime? Or a politician with enemies in the other party (happens all the time, and judging from Watergate and Hoover, also happens in the US)? Or an investigative journalist talking with his sources for that matter? Or how about a businessman discussing some multi-million dollar deal, or an investor?
Heck, how about a developer with several NDAs, in some major role in a big company, perhaps a FAANG one - like hundreds of people on HN?
I mean, you might be surprised but I'm sure there are more than a few users on HN that discus digital security configurations of large companies in their day jobs. I've been party to more than one conversation where some company unintentionally opened a security flaw for a short period of time that we discussed over a meeting, that if some evil 3rd party listened to may have gave them a window to exploit services.
The probability of someone just happening on that conversation while listening in, at just the right time, to just the right security engineer of the many security engineers in the company, approaches the probability of someone accidentally discovering the security flaw on their own. I think. It's hard to know with probabilities that are vanishingly small.
> just happening on that conversation while listening in, at just the right time,
Not that I'm a nefarious hacker or anything, but if I were to have made an app that snooped this audio stream, I wouldn't stop there. The audio would be uploaded to some virtual server and I'd run some AI transcription against it, then run some combination of NLP search and good ol' regex to forward me any audio file and its transcription that contained words like password, security, vulnerability, login, pin number. Any series of numbers around 16 digits long, a list of all current members of congress and major foreign politicians and diplomats, fortune 500 ceo names...
For like $10/mo, (or even more likely, the cost of hijacking someone else's unsecured wordpress server) there can always be something listening.
Credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords. People say all of these things around loved ones all the time without worrying about hardware being "around." Hardware, shockingly, is always around.
And despite the author's dismissal of the Facebook listening "myth," everyone I know has an uncomfortable advertising eavesdropping anecdote. Maybe we can agree it's more correctly an unsubstantiated claim.
National security is nothing more than the sum total of the individual
securities of each citizen.
If your granny cannot trust technology not to have her bank account
emptied by criminals, and Bob the local businessman cannot have a
conversation free from casual industrial espionage of competitors,
then that's national security. We live within nations that prosper
as a result of our individual prosperity, and which perform a duty of
care to protect those citizens.
The phrase took on grandiose and "special interest" tones during the
Cold War and Vietnam era, particularly under Nixon.
But this is 2022, and I urge you to carefully rethink what that phrase
means in a connected and increasingly hostile world. Everyone's
privacy is a small part of National Security.
I talk about my personal life (including such topics as my marriage and other things) quite often, and I don't want others to be able to record those conversations.
Simple kill switches would be nice to see but I doubt Apple would ever implement something like that.