379
Hundreds of smartphone apps are monitoring users through their microphones
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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I know I'm usually on the more paranoid side, but I've always assumed everything I do on a smartphone is potentially being monitored via camera or mics.
If the apps are just taking screenshots, or recording a few seconds of data via mic, it would be almost guaranteed that certain corrupt (and also paranoid) governments that are dismissive of privacy rights could force or bribe those apps to allow them to also access screens, mics, and cameras anyway, right?
I'm in the U.S., and especially with how glitchy my phone has suddenly become over the last few months, I'm just at the point where I just assume that's what's going on.
I had the same android for like 4 years without many issues, then suddenly around February it just became almost impossible to use. Weird glitchy things with the size of the tool bar at the bottom of my screen and the popup keyboard. Redirect notifications all the time for certain websites, and my VPN connection is just constantly interrupted and having to be reset.
I finally was like fuck it, this is an old phone so maybe that's it. Brand new phone, but most of the same issues.
I use signal instead of text most of the time, and switched a lot of things to proton mail, but if someone is potentially recording your screen, does it really matter if what you're doing is encrypted?
Which VPN provider are you using? How do you know they are not the one monitoring your phone?
Did you obtained your phone from a trusted source, such as an official seller. Some phones purchased from overseas might have "International ROM" installed by the seller, which compromises the integrity of the device.
Consider having a trusted tech friend look over your phone to see if the device has malware installed.
I use proton VPN, but no I always just get my phones from Amazon bc it's cheap. Never was a real problem in the past, but now that the U.S. is (officially) a giant Oligopoly, probably not a wise idea.
I don't really know any tech friends that are super in the know about that kind of thing. I have a paid Norton 360 subscription that does frequent scans for malware and says it never finds anything, but honestly wouldn't even be surprised to learn I'm paying for a useless subscription.
I'm also in a state that was involved in a huge government data breach a few years back. They didn't really go into it too much when it happened, but apparently just about everyone over the age of 18 had their private data compromised.
The only reason I even bring that up is bc our current Governor who has always been a power hungry authoritarian boot licker renewed the Executive Order for a state of emergency for a cyber incident that our previous governor first created when the data breach happened several years ago.
When he "renewed" the order, he also slipped in a new section that granted authority to the director of one of his cabinet's agencies, Governor's office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), to handle the emergency as he sees fit.
What's even more concerning is that on the same day he renewed this order, he restructured GOHSEP so that it is now under the control of the state's National Guard, gave the former director of GOHSEP a new title, and then named a member of the Guard "acting director."
He's been very vague about what the renewal was about, but it allegedly had something to do with updating the OMV/DMV data base for the state. Since then he has also created a hiring freeze for the state, which would seem to indicate that whoever was acting director is now indefinitely the director named in the executive order until the governor decides to lift the hiring freeze.
Even for someone not already paranoid, and without everything happening at a national level, that would all be a bit concerning right? I'm not a journalist, but I've been trying to get people to pay attention to it.
For some reason, no actual local journalists seem to be willing to point this out, but it's all publicly available information.
Proton is a trusted VPN/company.
Norton on PC might be useful, but on mobile, it's probably as good as a placebo.
Good luck with your state government. Sounds like a nightmare.
The reason no local journalist is critical of the state government is because there are no independent journalists left. Google and Meta have sucked up all the advertising dollars, so small local independent media cannot survive. The journalists have to work for mega corporations who dictate what they are allowed to write.
Yeah that is kind of a given, I just wish more people would wake up to that fact.
Every day more people ate taking notice, hopefully we can hit a critical mass within our life times