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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2268 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Why would you trust the Phone OS to set the electronic switch off (a physical switch isn't possible) if you don't trust the same OS to not route audio to the app without your permission?

Why a physical switch isn't possible? Looks like very basic thing, just interrupt the circuit.

There isn't "the circuit" to interrupt. A phone has something like half a dozen digital MEMS microphones, so you'd have to interrupt a whole bunch of circuits with a single switch. That'd require an expensive and more failure prone multi-pole switch and would be hell to route. You can't just cut power to the mics either because you need to turn off the clock signal before cutting power to prevent overdriving the protection diodes and also short circuiting the clock driver (and you can't sequence the clocks because the switch directly cuts power before the cpu has a chance to react). Plus of course there would again be the routing issue.

Then there are the legal ramifications. You have to be able to call the emergency number while paniccing and phones go to quite some lengths to bypass blocks to enable that. This would of course be impossible with a physical switch.

Finally, the whole thing is completely and utterly pointless for anything other than state level actors who have to worry about zero day exploits in the OS itself (where "turn off the phone" / "leave the phone in a sealed box" is more secure and much easier to do). Anyone with half a clue of how operating systems work knows that an app can't "just access" the microphone and the OS has to do a whole lot of work to stream audio to an application via a dedicated API that is used solely for that (which is a fundamental difference from all the typical file permission bypass exploits).

This is a very convincing argument about physical microphone switch being completely impossible. As somebody who never designed a phone, I have to completely defer to your expertise. Except for one small thing: phones with physical microphone switches actually exist. Example: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ Must be using some kind of unholy black magic, because is also costs less than many of those phones where there's absolutely no way to do it, both physically and legally. As people should not associate with unholy black magic, I guess we'd have to agree this is just not possible.

Must be using some kind of unholy black magic

Yes, also known as "worse performance in the aspects that people actually care about". If all you cared about was apps not being able to listen to the microphone, you could always buy a dumbphone with no apps (or just not install any apps you're concerned about).

Also do you actually know that they disconnect the microphone or are you just believing their marketing material? Have you verified it yourself from the schematics? If you haven't done even that, why do you trust it more than what every expert in the topic says about audio routing and app permissions in regular phone OSes?

I think the discussion is descending into ridiculousness at this point. No, I don't know that the whole cell phone thing is not just one giant CIA mind control operation aimed at stealing my precious bodily fluids, and I don't care about it. So I don't think there's a point to continue here.

I think the discussion is descending into ridiculousness at this point.

Yes, that's what happens when you discard explanations from domain experts given in good faith in favor of conspiracy theories that you've already decided to believe against all evidence.

I'm sorry but "if you didn't personally verify the wiring layout of your phone therefore all your concerns about phone software are invalid" doesn't sound like an expert-level argument. I know "expert" doesn't mean what it used to mean anymore, but this approach is ridiculous whether the person advancing it considers himself an "expert" or not.

I also don't think acting like:

you'd have to interrupt a whole bunch of circuits with a single switch.

is difficult, is a sign of expertise in electro-mechanical control. Like you can trivially find off the shelf products to do that, it's not even that complicated of a circuit, it's practically what transistors were invented to do.

There is a reason laptop webcams now often have physical lens covers. From that paper:

A simple solution to the problem is to provide a physical switch...

All of this to say it's not that outlandish that there is a zero day that allows the NSA to listen to your phone without activating the icon. I assume the reputational risk to Facebook is not worth it though, since they probably have other ways of figuring out what ads to deliver.

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