Why is it so difficult to prove or disprove that a smartphone spies on what its owner is saying

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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

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because when you download an app you dont download the source code. Unless open source there is no way to just look at the real code to figure such things out. There are decompilers to get some code out of the files you download but they arent realy readable and its nearly impossible to be confident about what the code does/is supposed to do if you just have the decompiled code.

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