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
It’s relatively easy to prove that a smartphone spies on your conversations – if it does. There are traffic logs, there are power consumption patterns, there is reverse engineering… But it’s totally impossible to prove that the smartphone *doesn’t* spy on you – because how do you prove an absence of something?
But think about it. There are a lot of talented hackers in the world. They find ways in to the most secured and exotic systems – look, for example, at GrayKey, a dongle that can breach the iPhone’s biometric protection (one of the most secure hardware designs in the world) in less than 24 hours. Reverse engineering the store apps like Facebook or tiktok would be a piece of cake for them. And yet the best piece of “evidence” we have is by weak inference – “I talked about the <thing> and now I’m presented with ads about <thing>”.
Latest Answers