Qualification:

I’ve heard various rumors, some of which seem to be true, such as that the phone works even when it’s turned off and maybe records all the time you’re talking, and with neural networks you can find out what you said, even if you were ten meters away from the phone and in another room, you can use the neural network to improve the sound quality and still know What did you say.

There is also information that the phone can see through objects, so gluing something to the camera will not help.

I don’t know what to do, I’m scared. Do you have any ideas on how to save myself from this if I live in the city and use my smartphone?

  • Wugmeister@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    18 hours ago

    The thing about the phone seeing through objects is not true for all but 1 phone model: there was a phone released a while back that had an infrared camera which could see through thin plastics and clothes. Your phone can’t do this.

    The other capability you mention of listening to everything all the time is technically possible if some three-letter agency or corp started targeting you specifically and got access to your phone to install literal spying software on it. You don’t have to worry about that. The mundane device that is actually doing that is your Alexa (if you have one).

    If you are feeling seriously paranoid about this, you can factory reset your phone. On my Samsung phone, this is done by going to Settings, scrolling all the way down to General Management, scrolling all the way down again to Reset, and then selecting Factory Data Reset.

    A more reasonable conspiracy theory thing to be worried about is that the government has access to a spyware program that can non-invasively (and therefore silently) take up space in your phone’s cache, relaying everything you do back to its user. However, since its not actually installed on your phone, restarting your phone once each day will mitigate the damage this can cause. I have set my phone to restart at 3 AM every day for this reason. (It’s also just generally a good idea to restart your phone regularly; it will run better if you do.)