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From an article in the July 21, 2016 Business Insider:
Edward Snowden wants you to know at all times whether the NSA is keeping tabs on your iPhone.
Along with Andrew Huang, his coauthor and fellow hacker, Snowden presented his research on phone "hardware introspection" at MIT [PDF], which aims to give users the ability to see whether their phone is sending out secret signals to an intelligence agency.
In their paper, Snowden and Huang make it clear that what you see on your phone's screen is not always true.
If you turn off Bluetooth or cellular service, the phone's radios and other electronics can still be made to send signals, especially if they are compromised by a sophisticated intelligence agency or hackers. Even airplane mode isn't a defense, since the current version of Apple's iOS still keeps the GPS active while in that state.
"Trusting a phone that has been hacked to go into airplane mode is like trusting a drunk person to judge if they are sober enough to drive," they write.
So instead of trusting the phone's software to tell the user if something is fishy, the pair proposes something else: A device that plugs into the hardware and constantly scans to see whether is transmitting.
Though they think their research can be applied to just about any phone, for right now they are building a device for the 4.7" Apple iPhone 6.
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:45AM
What's the point of a phone in airplane mode anyway? You might just as well turn it off.
If you are seriously concerned about people tracking your phone, surely you get one with a removable battery?
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2016, @09:57AM
Trusting a removable battery is the only battery? How naive.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Saturday July 23 2016, @10:42AM
If you're using it as an MP3 player and are on a plane?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday July 23 2016, @08:01PM
Not to mention camera, PDA, game system, offline video player, etc,etc,etc.
And not just when on a plane, it's also great when out of range of cell towers (basements, wilderness, etc) and you don't want to waste battery life (and microwave your jewels) by having the radio screaming for attention as loud as it can to towers that aren't there.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zz9zZ on Saturday July 23 2016, @07:19PM
I dropped my smartphone from a few years back and the battery popped out. I quickly picked it up worried about the removal while it was running, and you guessed it, phone was working just fine. No idea how big the backup battery was or how long it would last, but it made it quite clear to me that phones can't be trusted.
~Tilting at windmills~