Assignment in progress for 23.0510001 American Lit & Comp A - Miner - 1Due December 20, 2024

Question

Smartphones Put Your Privacy At Risk
Devices can divulge a whole lot of data on your comings and goings
Maria Temming
2018
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In this informational text, Maria Temming discusses how smartphones collect information about people and the different ways that information is being used.
As you read, take notes on the different ways that smartphones collect information about users.

Consider everything your smartphone has done for you today. Counted your steps? Transcribed notes? Navigated you somewhere new?

Smartphones make for versatile pocket assistants. That’s because they’re equipped with a suite of sensors. And some of those sensors you may never think — or even know — about. They sense light, humidity, pressure, temperature and other factors.

Smartphones have become essential companions. So those sensors probably stayed close by throughout your day. They sat in your backpack or on the dinner table or nightstand. If you’re like most smartphone users, the device was probably on the whole time, even when its screen was blank.

“Sensors are finding their ways into every corner of our lives,” says Maryam Mehrnezhad. She’s a computer scientist at Newcastle University in England. That’s a good thing when phones are using their powers to do our bidding. But the many types of personal information that phones have access to also makes them potentially powerful spies.

Online app store Google Play has already discovered apps that are abusing their access to those sensors. Google recently booted 20 apps from Android phones and its app store. Those apps could record with the microphone, monitor a phone’s location, take photos and then extract the data. And they could do all of this without a user’s knowledge!

Stolen photos and sound bites pose obvious privacy invasions. But even seemingly innocent sensor data might broadcast sensitive information. A smartphone’s motions might reveal what a user is typing. Or it might disclose someone’s location. Even barometer readings could be misused. These readings subtly shift with increased altitude. That could give away which floor of a building you’re on, suggests Ahmed Al-Haiqi. He’s a security researcher at the National Energy University in Kajang, Malaysia.

Message revealed
Motion detectors are some of the tools within smartphones that are collecting data. These include their accelerometer (Ak-sell-ur-AHM-eh-tur) and the rotation-sensing gyroscope. Such bits of technology could be prime tools for sharing data without your knowing it.

One reason: They’re not permission-protected. That means a phone’s user doesn’t have to give a newly installed app permission to access those sensors. So motion detectors are fair game for any app downloaded onto a device.

In an April 2017 study, Mehrnezhad’s team at Newcastle showed that touching different regions of a screen makes the phone tilt and shift just a tiny bit. You may not notice it. But your phone’s motion sensors will. The data they collect may “look like nonsense” to the human eye, says Al-Haiqi. Yet clever computer programs can tease out patterns in that mess. They can then match segments of motion data to taps on various regions of the screen.

For the most part, these computer programs are algorithms that make up a type of machine learning, Al-Haiqi says. Researchers first train the programs to recognize keystrokes. They do this by feeding the programs lots of motion-sensor data. Those data are then labeled with the key tap that produced a particular movement.

A pair of researchers built TouchLogger. It’s an app that collects sensor data on a phone’s orientation in space. It uses these data to figure out how a user had been tapping on a smartphone’s number keyboard. In a 2011 test on phones made by a company in Taiwan, called HTC, TouchLogger figured out more than 70 percent of key taps correctly.

Since then, more studies have come out showing similar results. Scientists have written code to infer keystrokes on number and letter keyboards for different types of phones. In one 2016 study, Al-Haiqi’s team reviewed how successful these efforts were. And they concluded that only a snoop’s imagination limits the ways motion data could be translated into key taps. Those keystrokes could reveal everything from the password entered on a banking app to the contents of a text message.

A more recent application used a whole fleet of smartphone sensors to guess PINs. (A PIN is a sequence of numbers used to access a bank account.) The app analyzed a phone’s movement. It also noted how, during typing, the user’s finger blocked the light sensor. When tested on a pool of 50 PIN numbers, the app could discern keystrokes with 99.5 percent accuracy. The researchers reported this in December 2017 on the Cryptology ePrint Archive.

Other researchers have paired motion data with microphone recordings. A phone’s mic can pick up the soft sound of a fingertip tapping on a screen. One group designed a malicious app. It could masquerade as a simple note-taking tool. When the user tapped on the app’s keyboard, the app covertly recorded the keys’ input. It also recorded the simultaneous microphone and gyroscope readings. That let it learn the sound and feel to correctly diagnose each keystroke.

The app could even listen in the background when the user entered sensitive info on other apps. This phone app was tested on Samsung and HTC phones. It inferred the keystrokes of 100 four-digit PINs with 94 percent accuracy.

Such high success rates come mostly from tests made in controlled settings, notes Al-Haiqi. Those tests assume that users will hold their phones a certain way each time or will sit down while typing. How these info-extracting programs fare in a wider range of real-world conditions remains to be seen. But the answer to whether motion and other sensors would open the door for new privacy invasions is “an obvious yes,” he says.
Main idea of the text

Answer 1

The main idea of the text "Smartphones Put Your Privacy At Risk" by Maria Temming is that smartphones collect a vast amount of personal information through various sensors, which can lead to significant privacy invasions. The text discusses how these sensors, including accelerometers and gyroscopes, can be exploited by apps to gather sensitive data without users' knowledge or permission. It highlights the potential risks of unauthorized data access, such as inferring keystrokes, tracking user locations, and eavesdropping on personal interactions, ultimately emphasizing the need for awareness and caution regarding smartphone privacy.