Now Apple has removed that ... and I am not happy. Yes, the functionality is theoretically available by configuring the 'smart button'. But I don't physically see the state of the device without picking it up.
Turning off connectivity doesn't help as much to guarantee your privacy as the phone could theoretically be recording and then upload the recording later, when you turn it back on (if it was thoroughly compromised, which admittedly seems unlikely, but nevertheless it would be nice to have some guarantee that it's impossible).
What a lot of people talk about is a headphone jack. But even that niche has been filled by USB-C adapters for people that really want them and not only talk nostalgic about it.
Then once I'm there, what do I do with the phone? Ask to put it in a separate room and hope that the microphone isn't powerful enough to pick up our conversation?
I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?
For me, as a user, the easiest solution would be to have a killswitch. I understand that building it would be more work, of course :)
I doubt they'd even get the RND cost for that change back, this is a feature no one cares about except a very very small minority within a small minority. I'm a hardcare FOSS only user and only use grapheneos/fedora linux on my devices for privacy and security reasons and even I am not remotely concerned about hardware switches when i can just powerdown the wifi/Gps/wwan connection.
Wireless-only, data-harvesting slabs are good enough for ME, so they oughta be good enough FOR EVERYONE!
At least in the US geofencing warrants are a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant
It is prudent to protect oneself against that.
2. That advice sounds more reasonable if you assume a reasonable government that is only interested in tracking people who are torching cars. Governments have retaliated against political dissidents in the past who have committed no crimes.
For protests, the physical switch is an attempt to find a technical solution to a societal problem, which rarely works out. You may as well keep your (Android) phone in your pocket (but turned off, though that won't help with iOS' Find My network).
That might be true on planet Ogo, but not on planet Earth.
> "For protests, the physical switch is an attempt to find a technical solution to a societal problem, which rarely works out."
Another utterly absurd statement. Killswitches are, amongst other places and situations, useful on the battlefield (and therefore urban "battlefield", e. g. protests). And turning a practical solution to tactical and operational problems into a discussion about the inapplicability of such solutions to cure the "ills of society" at large is just... bizarre.
The demand for a headphone jack is fueled by functionality and sustainability concerns, not nostalgia - can't, too recent a change and current devices do have the port.
I wear a helmet and leather when I ride my motorcycle. Obviously, it'd be safer to never ride the motorcycle. But, I want to the ride the motorcycle, so, if I'm going to do it, it makes sense to mitigate my risk on it.
If people want to go to protests, they should, however a killswitch isn't good enough imo - you should leave your phone at home so the cops don't steal it from you, force you to unlock it with your fingerprint or faceID (a valid legal order in the USA), and then hunt through the contents to hit you with some bogus charge.
Governments and carriers retaining months of location history data is a risk. If the Russians invade and get a hold of that data, a lot of people suddenly become at risk, for no good reason other than it being around "just in case".
We've seen it happen here in the Netherlands when the nazis came in and happily browsed through the city archives, which contained a details count of how many people of what religion lived in each neighbourhood.
I have nothing to fear from the current government, but with the rise in ultraconservative, anti-intellectual, extreme right wing politicians across the globe, a lot of people may not want to be recorded having been to things that are perfectly safe today.
All of that said, as long as you don't have an iPhone, you can just turn your phone off. It'll power down the CPU. If you don't believe the manufacturer, then you'll have to measure the voltage on the PCB traces yourself, but so should you when you buy phones with a physical off switch.
Yes, that's what I had to do for meetings that the organizer thought were important enough. Also, in very sensitive areas special rooms with anti-eavesdropping gear are common [1].
> I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?
But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;)
Don't get me wrong, I think a killswitch can make a lot of sense for highly sensitive areas (R&D, politics, military, ...), but I don't think Fairphone 6 are the devices that target this demographic and thus should not include one. Furthermore, current "offline" measure seem to mitigate the problem okay enough to not need such a killswitch - else we would already have phones with such features. And lastly, killswitches can only mitigate parts of the features modern spyware [2] implements and does not protect from simple human-based errors like the United States government group chat leaks [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...
I would be, because I asked for a killswitch for the microphone and cameras, not a killswitch for connectivity like the original comment.
If I get a call while the killswitch is active, I can stop the sensitive conversation, turn on the microphone, and answer the call.
At the moment iPhones seem to drain power even when they are "off" which makes me suspect that they aren't, in fact, actually fully powered off. There have been a few occasions when I have been without a charger for one reason or another, and would like to be able to fully power off my phone in order to save battery.
The one upside is convenience of not having a separate dongle, which is pretty well offset by the significant increase in phone size needed to accommodate the jack.
They probably don't want to position themselves against security-focused phones as they would likely be compared unfavorably with them. That is unless they also do whatever it takes to enter that market, for example by supporting a security-focused OS like GrapheneOS.
They could have kept the headphone jack though, but I guess they wanted to sell their earbuds (with replaceable batteries! which is at least a good point).
For the external DAC, you have to balance the "you could buy that once" against all the consumers that are pushed by the omission of the headphone jack to buy throwaway head- and earphones with glued in batteries. There is no chance in hell that the waste produced of both paths is in favour of the jackless phones.
First and foremost, it would be less noisy! What MC riders tend to conveniently forget is that they are putting the burden of having to deal with the noise they produce on everyone around them. Yes, your safety is also important (for you), but the noise you're producing is an issue for everyone around you.
Also, imo cars and their driver's dependence on them are a significantly greater cause of noise pollution than me and my stock pipe motorcycle, or even a harley. Hundreds of car tires rolling by on the road all day every day is so horrendously loud I can hear it from the 21st floor of my parent's apartment. When the 3 nearby red lights line up perfectly it's suddenly so quiet you can hear the cidadas on the mountain.
Not to mention the beeping, in the city I can hear a car beep from hundreds of meters away, echoing off the buildings. Or sometimes when I'm a pedestrian they'll dare to beep at me for the crime of walking in a way that inconveniences them, that's very very loud!
I take my motorcycle from my apartment straight into the basically unlived-on mountain roads, two weekends a month at most. I highly doubt I'm burdening anyone even a fraction what the average car driver does to tens of thousands of people every week.