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Comment by germanier | Hacker News Reader

German law prohibits "transmitting equipment which, by its form, purports to be another object or is disguised under an object of daily use and, due to such circumstances, is particularly suitable and intended for intercepting the non-publicly spoken words of another person without their detection" (§ 90 TKG). This was the basis for this statement by the regulator and explains why it was not restricted to certain uses. It was not based on insecurity of those devices. Even if they were perfectly secure that would not change anything.

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Shouldn't mobile phones also be banned under that definition? Or at least mobile phones "disguised" in your pants pocket or purse.

Phones are not disguising as a device that doesn't capture sound, people are considered aware that phones can communicate. A phone with a special "spy mode" in which it looks like it is turned off but actually is working like one of these watches might trigger the law, since a person seeing it turned off could have a reasonable expectation of not being captured.

You hiding a phone isn't the fault of the product type, and thus only your actions might be illegal, not phones themselves.

Most phones do have a "spy mode", it's just activated by the NSA.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/06/technology/security/nsa-turn...

> A phone with a special "spy mode" in which it looks like it is turned off but actually is working like one of these watches might trigger the law

All phones have this mode; it's a feature to consume less battery by shutting off the display when you're not using it.

The intended purpose of mobile phones is not to spy on unsuspecting bystanders. Phones are even explicitly mentioned in the official justification by the parliament when they enacted that law.

At this point it's safe to assume everyone is carrying an active microphone all the time. They ought to update this law to account for that reality.

The law in its current form was passed in 2012 and was specifically restricted to devices that have the purpose of spying. We can safely assume that the lawmakers were aware of current technology.

If Germany lawmakers actually understand this stuff, I'm jealous. American politicians have basically no clue at all.

Certainly not everybody. This law was last changed as a part of a large telecommunication bill. The proceedings show that they are aware that technology can move very fast (thus the law needs to be written as open as possible) and it's hard to precisely differentiate between e.g. phones (or new form of legitimate technology) and dedicated spying devices (thus the law needs to be written as specific as possible). Given those goals I think they made a pretty good job.

And phones don't have the purpose of spying?

Where are you living? Probably not in Germany.

It's highly unlikely that anyone carries an active Microphone if they are not actively making a call with their phone.

You're saying nobody in Germany uses "ok google" or "hey siri" hotwords? What constitutes an "active microphone"? Is it only when audio data is being recorded or streamed, or is it the mere act of processing audio with any type of software? What if the software is malicious, running in the background and not indicating it's actively recording/streaming/processing all the time?

I'm asking this mostly rhetorically, but just trying to point out that when most things these day are controlled by software that is remotely and automatically updated and installed (including firmware, baseband software, and background apps), it's nearly impossible to say something like "yes, this device has a microphone, but it's not 'listening' right now", let alone define it legally.

In this case it's probably not a concern because the people using these microphones maliciously are most likely the German and/or U.S. governments.

At the same time, nobody with a smartphone actually knows whether or not they're carrying an active microphone around or who could be listening to what's being recorded.

It's not possible to listen for "Hello Siri" or "Okay, Google" when the microphone is not active.

The purpose of the "Hey Siri" and "Okay, Google" functionality is to listen to those specific phrases. It is not intended to be used to covertly record people and can not be used by a regular consumer to do so. The law does not concern itself with technicalities such as what constitutes an "active microphone". What matters is intent. That's a pretty easy question to answer for those watches. This functionality is literally a bullet-point in their ads.

And yet we've seen similar technology in other products, like Samsung TVs, being used to gather huge amounts of information for the U.S. government. From a security standpoint, understanding the capabilities is really all that's relevant. If it's possible that it could be used in that way, then it probably can't be trusted not to be used in that way. Especially since these devices receive OTA updates and there are a number of ways to attack them on a relatively large scale by doing things like spoofing a cell tower.

If the concern is individuals using their own devices intentionally for spying purposes...that's relatively easy for a non-technical person to do with a smartphone if they want to.

It's pretty well known though in this day and age that smart watches can have recording capabilities, so if the problem is that "a watch looks like something that can't record" all smart watches should be banned by that logic.

I don't feel like that actually applies here, but if it does it should also apply to the entire smartwatch category.

The devices this is about allow to listen in remotely. I am pretty sure that even many of the wearers (children) don't know that. At least some of those devices don't look like a smartwatch on first glance either, e.g. http://www.eltern-zeit.de/wp-content/uploads/lokato-kidswatc...

> It's pretty well known though in this day and age that smart watches can have recording capabilities

This isn't true for hybrid smartwatches and fitness trackers. Those devices don't have listening devices and require tethered cell phones for internet communication, which already enables GPS tracking. It'll be interesting to see if this has been written in such a way as to exclude those or lump them in with the devices being targeted.

In the USA maybe, but german culture in general doesn't track the newest tech as fervently.

Goddammit you people are fucking idiots.

Are German laws written in English, or did you find a translation somewhere? I've never looked up German laws before, evidently ;)

German laws are written in German and any translation is bound to miss many important subtleties (even a layperson's reading of the original is going to miss something). I found this translation last time this topic came up here (it was teddy bears with spy cams then). Honestly it's not really good, especially when debating finer details as happens downthread. At least it conveys the basic gist of it.

There are "official" translations of some laws, but not all of them. In any case they're always only meant as a convenience, the German version obviously being the only source of truth.

In this case the sentence is taken from the english version of their press release regarding the cayla dolls:

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

A list of translated laws can be found here, but I couldn't find the TKG among them:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/Teilliste_translations.ht...

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