I would just be happy if NSA coverage wasn't brought up in the comment section of unrelated articles. Most of the conversation about the new iPhone 5 revolved around the NSA and I found that very disappointing.
Don't you think that they are related? iPhone knows who you are and where you are at all times. Apple cooperates with NSA. NSA is found to abuse the data it collects from computer companies, probably in ways that infringe on the constitutional rights on Americans. Follow the logic, and pretty soon you have the NSA tracking you and recording audio, video, with fingerprints, and it all goes in a large government database to be mined by who-knows-who and who-knows-when, for who-knows-what reason.
Improbable you say? Welcome to the magic of software, big data, and billions of dollars worth of computers.
Essentially, whenever you snap a photo with that new shiny iPhone, you have no way to know that a US, Canadian, British, Australian, or Israeli agent isn't going to look at that photo in the future. And if they, why not also other-state agents, such as the Russians, the Chinese, or, God forbid, the French!
The NSA is tasked with protecting us, no? Not endangering us. And we fund it with our tax dollars.
Granted, what is said about the iPhone is also quite applicable to other technologies such as Android and the other remnants.
This is pure speculation, neither original nor insightful, and like the parent I'm tired of it.
Now, in light of the recent revelations and since we don't know what we don't know, these comments probably can't be labelled as complete garbage like your regular conspiracy theories. But instead of idly speculating about the same things in every single comment thread it'd be far more useful, both for this cause and for the people who want a saner Hacker News, to do some actual technical analysis. Which in this case isn't that hard.
If you're really concerned about your smartphone spying on you, just hook it up to a packet sniffer and analyze the data it transfers over the internet. Since image and audio files will have to be of considerable size in order to be useful they should be fairly easy to spot, especially in the upload direction.
I'm sure nobody here would mind a submission or comment with any kind of technical analysis. Actually I don't even mind speculation, but the constant repeating of the same points, without any technical basis, in almost every single comment thread is what gets annoying for me.
How do you hook up the phone to a packet sniffer if they want to upload the "extra data" via 3g/4g/4gLTE and not make that appear on your bill, and specifically not go through wifi. Also, 3g/4g is encrypted.
So disable all background services and don't access anything that uses data on your phone and see what the carrier bills you? Unless you believe that Apple somehow has secret arrangements with every mobile operator... in which case you could simply get a MiFi and tether all your smartphone traffic through that, problem solved.
In the end, if you really believe something malicious is happening in this regard, you can either prove (if said data is actually transferred over WiFi) or prevent (if it's only transferred over mobile data) it, rendering mere speculation about this issue useless.
Did you read my response? Connect your smartphone to a MiFi (which establishes a mobile data connection and shares it through a WiFi hotspot) if you're concerned about that.
That's whats so disgusting about the situation; NSA has its fingers in so many places that questioning everything is not wrong. But it's so sad and disgusting when that is done. I hope we can return to normalcy soon enough where everything doesn't need to be analyzed for a NSA angle.
