I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I do wonder about the idea that by making the power source impossible to remove, the phone can be a surveillance device even when the user thinks it's powered off.
I wonder what the minds of HN think about this scenario. Is the move towards non-removable batteries perhaps related to this?
I also wonder about the movement away from physical headphone jacks....I imagine bluetooth is easier to hack then a physical cable.
Edit: thanks for engaging on this. You helped me discount this theory.
The first thing to ask if we think that the non removable batteries is related to surveillance is how a non removable battery would help surveillance. And it’s hard to see how it would. The vast majority of people would leave their removable batteries in the phone with it on anyways, since they don’t expect the surveillance. The next level of paranoid people would switch off the phone, in which case it wouldn’t matter if the battery was removable or not. The only crowd it would affect is the people who are paranoid enough that they would additionally also remove the battery. But if they are so careful, if they do have a phone with a non removable battery, then they have a simple alternate solution of simply locking up the phone in a lockbox and not taking it into the room you’re having the discussion (or taking it around with you if you’re worried about tracking).
Insisting on non removable batteries will give you an extremely minor benefit (people who are careful enough to want to remove their batteries for privacy, but not dedicated enough that given a non removable battery, they will still keep their phone around and won’t find an alternate solution).
So really, it doesn’t make sense at all.
Further, there’s a completely explainable, and frankly predictable, trajectory and goal that led to non removable batteries. The same goal that led to other changes such as the removing of the headphone jack, etc.
"a completely explainable, and frankly oredictable, trajectory and goal that ked to... changes such as the removing of the headphone jack, etc." Bad taste? Narcissistic corporate executives... with impractically bad taste?
:-) Yeah, no need to go to a conspiracy theory with no rational basis or factual evidence when stupidity,greed, incompetence or a combination thereof will explain the result. It seems to me that these kinds of theories only build up the power and influence of those petty industrial tyrants to the detriment of all.
Still, cold comfort to those of us who have lost the replaceable battery option and dread the day headphone jacks disappear forever.
You have to undersize parts for a watertight fit, which can result in undesirable characteristics when deformation or dropping of a device does happen. There's also an increasing tendency to use the outer shell of a device as a heat-sink/radiator. Adhesives enable this type of design but make it darn near impossible to maintain.
I'm not going to say there isn't a mustache twirler somewhere with surveillance plans of grandeur... but unfortunately the truth may be closer to it's cheaper to buy a tube of glue than to get a tub of small, self-tapping screws.
That's just my 2 cents from having torn things apart and put them back together to varying degrees of success.
Cars and tractor PCB's as far as I'm aware tap into the vehicle's electrical subsystem, therefore living off the battery. This is why if you don't drive a vehicle or use a tractor regularly, you should be keeping the battery on a maintainer. Most control units have parasitic load to retain ECU state between engine on states, and to keep vehicle security systems doing their thing. They don't usually have dedicated batteries beyond maybe a button for cmos, but again, I haven't seen that in an automotive context. That'll flatline a lead acid battery if you don't drive it or run it for a couple weeks. Guess how I know?
Now, a lot of cars increasingly DO have dedicated antennas for OTA updates, phoning home telemetry and things like that. There might be some wireless CANBUS(It's either that or CAN, I don't have it on the top of my head at the moment).
The real culprit for me is bloody tablets and laptops. No excuses. The ultra-thin form factors are nothing but regressions in maintainability to me. Smartphones I don't even grudgingly accept anymore. The material selection and designs have biased only achieving realistic resilience through off loading that facet of design to accessory manufacturers. Anybody with a "naked" handset should know that current marketing/consumer quality metrics are not aligned on durability in normal chaotic human usage at all.
That's unlikely because people would notice the devices working while off. Your power draw comes from two sources unless you run games and heavy apps: display and radios - and there's enough interest and measurement happening there that people would notice radios activating when they shouldn't.
There's also lots of interest in tracking device communication and I really expect someone to notice a randomly appearing device where there shouldn't be one.
The attack scenario is, that the mobile just listens to you via the microphone and saves it - and later when normaly turned on, sends away all the data.
All of this on a very low hardware layer, so no need for complex cpu operations or engage with the OS(in case of turned "off"). So very low power demand.
And it would also not show up, in anyone doing radiotraffic/wlan analysis.
So it would be indeed very hard to spot.
(don't have the sources, but I think on some defcon was a talk with proof of concept about this)
So if anyone thinks, he is a specific target of some powerful intelligence agency, (like someone strongly engaged with the opposition in Hong Kong) - I think they definitely should consider this scenario as a possible one (but I don't know how likely it actually is, probably not high, if your are not considered a leader).
But that this change for non-removable batteries in general was made, so that even the paranoid part of the population can be tracked non-stop by the global Illuminati ... is indeed very much tinfoil area.
But the part about your phone maybe spying on you, when you think it is off:
I wonder what the minds of HN think about this scenario. Is the move towards non-removable batteries perhaps related to this?
I also wonder about the movement away from physical headphone jacks....I imagine bluetooth is easier to hack then a physical cable.
Edit: thanks for engaging on this. You helped me discount this theory.