Should we get out our cameras or hide our phone screens? I guess it depends on legality and purpose.
Spy software can see smartphone texting realtime (w/ Video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Last month, there was news from video provider Qumu of their discomforting survey that at least half of Americans would use smartphones to secretly spy on others. Now there is rattling news that spy software can easily do that kind of job. The software can reveal what others are texting in their personal emails or text messages sent forth on their smartphones just by the snooper using a smartphone camera or advanced camera like a digital SLR that shoots HD video, which could read a screen up to 60 metres away.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill have used iSpy, the program, as proof that keying a private email message or text message in public, whether on a near-empty train or at the far end of a park bench away from everyone else, is still risky business.
They successfully were able to compromise the privacy of users typing on virtual keyboards with iSpy. They say iSpy can identify all the text typed on a smartphone display using video footage of the screen.
The UNC research team, Rahul Raguram, Andrew White, Dibenyendu Goswami, Fabian Monrose and Jan-Michael Frahm, discovered they could be on the second floor of a building and read a phone on the ground, leave alone sitting on a bus and catching all the text of a nearby passenger.
How much text at how far a distance depends on the spy device used, whether it is a regular smartphone camera or more advanced camera with lenses.
The team report their findings in the paper, “iSpy: Automatic Reconstruction of Typed Input From Compromising Reflections” and presented their work at the Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Chicago.
One of the nice features in smartphones, designed to help users type on small touchscreens, is magnified keys. Letters on the virtual keyboard rise up in bubbles. That is also one of the features that made it so easy for the snoopers to view footage and identify the letters based on the bubble locations. The program correctly identified letters over 90 percent of the time.
Wow. Talk about an invasion of privacy. And talk about one serious investigative journalism tool.
If this toothpaste is already out of the tube, we might want to learn how to use it.