KILL YOUR SMARTPHONE

There has been increasing awareness that smartphones can record your conversation even when you have the phone OFF. In my novel, Entangled, Jason Angle uses this to do some investigation. Let's be clear about a smartphone being OFF.

By OFF, most people think that means when they hang up a call. Okay, let's use that definition. In this mode, you can still use your smartphone, right? Calendar, ToDos, music, they all work because your smartphone is not off, only the PHONE is "off." Anytime you see those bars, the signal strength indicator on your phone, you are connected to a cell tower (service provider, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, etc). Your phone sends some data once in a while to tell the cellular tower that you can accept incoming calls. It also tells the tower where you are to within a 100 meters or so. And lastly, as has become news recently, an agency can have the tower tell your phone to send them whatever your microphone picks up. If you have speakerphone capability on your smartphone, this means you and others near you. Yes, that's right. Without you knowing, someone can listen to your conversations. And this also happens with your landline phones.

I used to design the chips, those integrated circuits, that went into smartphones. All this snooping capability is in software, which just controls the hardware at times. There are applications out there, like Window's system processes or Linux's daemons, that can live and run covertly in the smartphone operating system - it's just a computer program. They are like computer viruses. And smartphones are basically computers with a cell phone as a peripheral, like WiFi. These computers are capable of turning your cell phone function on at any time without you knowing, and send whatever the microphone hears, masking any visual clues. That's easy to program, really. The trick would be to get it on the smartphone without you knowing. That's another story.

By DEAD, I mean the battery is either really out of power, dead as roadkill, or the battery is removed. You can't use your smartphone to see your calendar, or read an ebook. It doesn't work at all. That's DEAD.

So, what to do? Even with wiretapping laws, some people and agencies don't follow them. Even if it's illegal, they can know what you're doing. They don't have to use that stuff in court.

I like my privacy sometimes. So if I'm ever anyplace, like a meeting with a publisher, and I really want my new book to remain secret, I kill my smartphone.

If you want to be lost somewhere or need real privacy, KILL YOUR SMARTPHONE.