let’s put aside everything !Aceticon@lemmy.world wrote you; if the French state was trying to legalize exactly this, it must be possible: la validation pure et simple de l’activation à distance des fonctions de géolocalisation de téléphone et autres objets connectés (voiture, balises airtag, montre etc) qui repose exactement sur le même procédé technique que le dispositif censuré : la compromission d’un périphérique, en y accédant directement ou par l’intermédiaire d’un logiciel espion pour en prendre le contrôle à distance.
Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone
dhork@lemmy.world 6 months agoIt can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
merde@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
dhork@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Nothing in your links above indicate that the spyware operates while the phones are powered off (although I relied on a crappy translation of the French). Could spyware mock the shutdown process so that it looks like the phone is powered off while the phone is actually running? Sure it can, but the victim will be tipped off when the phone’s battery is being drained even while it is “shut off”. (And someone who is paranoid enough to shut down their phone would pay attention to that.) . It seems like it’s not worth the effort.
merde@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
read, listen to people that were spied on using the pegasus software
easy to find
i don’t know if you’ve met any real activists, militants in your life but they’re rarely geeks. And checking the battery of their phone or reading about battery life isn’t one of their priorities
dhork@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yes, info on Pegasus is easy to find. And never says Pegasus is active when the phone is powered off. It’s undetectable and insidious in what it can grab, but at no point is there any reference at all to being active while the phone is powered off.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
If you have a reference that states otherwise (that isn’t written by an AI), please supply it. I’ll be happy to give up on this if someone can prove their point.
And that is because it is way too easy to detect when the phone is off, not only because of the battery drain, but because the radios would be transmitting when they shouldnt . Plus, persisting across a reboot requires some trace of the Trojan to be on physical storage, which is more likely to be found on a scan.
I am assuming that when a state-level actor is hacking a phone, they are targeting a person directly, and know how to get the Trojan on undetected. Their main goal will be to continue to siphon data off it while it is in use. It’s not worth the risk of detection to track it while it is off (and not being used, after all.) Don’t you think they would prefer to use the same method they used the first time to infect the burner phone that’s actually being used?
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
If you can’t take out the battery, it’s never actually off.
dhork@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s not quite how it works, though. These devices are basically mini computers now, there’s a limit to what they can do without fully booting. Devices that are plugged into the wall might be likely to retain some power-draining function while plugged in, but there’s only so much you can do on a trickle charge while a phone is powered off.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They’re still running in low power mode and can wakeup from the network so they can absolutelly be made to “boot up” without turning the screen on and you being aware of it.
This is not like bloody PC were the lights turn on and you can hear the fans when the thing is going, it’s a machine with a low power mode which itself can already do a lot and which can be brought to a high power mode if needed without there being any visible or audible side-effects to alert the user.
Unless you completelly cut it off from power (by taking the battery out, which you can’t in most modern smartphones) that smartphone with the lights off, the screen of and making no sound can just as easilly be in low power mode waiting for you to press the On button as it can be in full power mode with a mobile network connection active, accessing the microphone and the GPS microchip and sending that data out, and it looks exactly the same from the outside.
dhork@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I think you are overestimating what these devices can do when turned off, specifically when whoever is doing the tracking wants to be covert. Devices like Cellular Radios and GPS chipsets are getting more efficient every year, but they still consume enough power that it would be noticed if they came on by themselves even if the device was off.