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Comment by bryanatwood | Hacker News Reader

Yes there should be an icon when your mic is active. I tried to build a service in Android to do this but there's no API to get whether the mic is in use or not AFAIK. I ended up disabling mic access for almost all apps, but the Google App and Google Play Services complain when you do this.

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I'd go even further and light the notification LED the entire time something is reading the camera/mic from the firmware (such that applications can't disable it via software). The indicator works well for the webcams on most laptops.

Notification LED? A majority of phones(in the US) don't come with this and the ones that do need root permission to access it.

you are correct, but this was mostly brought up for historical reasons: researchers discovered an osx malware that after disabling the camera LED on older macbooks could secretly record the owner.

I'd go even even further and have a physical switch on the device. I want absolute certainty that my devices are incapable of spying on me when they are switched off.

Yeah, that's wishful thinking. Because even if there were such a switch, it would be deliberately perverted.

E.g. some SD cards have a "write-protect notch" the status of which can be changed by physically moving a sliding tab. Very reminiscent of write protect on floppy disks.

Here's the gotcha[1]:

The presence of a notch, and the presence and position of a tab, have no effect on the SD card's operation. A host device that supports write protection should refuse to write to an SD card that is designated read-only in this way. Some host devices do not support write protection, which is an optional feature of the SD specification. Drivers and devices that do obey a read-only indication may give the user a way to override it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Features

The LED should be in series with e.g. the Vcc pin on the ADC. Enabling the recording hardware needs to depend on the LED being on.

So it would always be on if you use OK Google?

This is exactly the idea. Be aware that you're being listened to.

That's a great idea. Even better if there were tiny dedicated LEDs near the front facing camera and microphone to make it 100% clear what they mean.

Communication privacy laws also need to be updated for modern times. It's a federal offense to steal someone's junk mail yet widespread electronic surveillance is somehow a business model.

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