After hearing about Cox Media Group, I am wondering why someone can’t simply look at the lines of code of an app or OS and see whether or not a connected device is spying on the user to sell them ads.
Like extract the .ipa Instagram app from an iphone and look at its code with xcode, search for audio recording features that could be running at times the iser isn’t running the app.
The multiple theories around this hypothesis always have something mystical about it as if coding wasn’t science.
In: Engineering
A few things.
1.) Code is closed-source and it isn’t as easy to reverse-engineer as ‘popping open a book’. When compiled, things aren’t exactly 1:1 – think of it like how translating some things from English to a foreign language and then back, don’t always come out how they started. Many companies intentionally obfuscate code through various means, so that makes it even harder.
2.) The app may have code to record something, but once it’s recorded and sent, you can’t see what they’re doing with it on their end. Take it to a more simplistic analogy, let’s say you have a guy sitting outside your window. He writes down everything you say and gives it to me. You could catch him writing it down, but once he leaves with that paper you have no clue what I’m doing with it – I could be looking for you saying certain things to catch you doing something, or use it to see if maybe you mentioned that you really could use a new roof in the near future. The real issue is, in many/most apps, you agree to that guy sitting outside your window in the big ol’ terms and conditions.
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