It was kind of amusing, when Snowden came forward and confirmed all the things I’d been telling my friends for years. They used to laugh at me – I was crazy, paranoid! – but now, no one thinks its crazy anymore. Well, OK – maybe they still think I am crazy, but they’re laughing a lot less.
I still tell them that privacy is a dead concept, and they still think I’m a bit crazy; a recent paper by Yan Michalevsky, Dan Boneh, and Gabi Nakibly once again shows that just because I’m crazy doesn’t mean I was wrong. As the paper’s abstract declares:
We show that the MEMS gyroscopes found on modern smart phones are sufficiently sensitive to measure acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The resulting signals contain only very low-frequency information (<200Hz). Nevertheless we show, using signal processing and machine learning, that this information is sufficient to identify speaker information and even parse speech. Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone.
