Apple patents tech that lets government disable iPhone video, camera and wi-fi

http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/apple-patents-tech-that-lets-g.html

by mikegerwitz • 13 years ago

42 28 13 years ago

boingboing.net

ozziegooen• 13 years ago

This is one patent I really hope gets used in litigation.

cageface4• 13 years ago

Ha. Came here to say exactly the same thing.

This is why mobile is too important to be in the control of a single proprietary vendor.

616c• 13 years ago

I believe we call that a mobile device manager. Only this one is much more pervasive and used by the Feds. I know of few companies that do not use one nowadays.

Is this not old news though? The first time I was really relieved I use CyanogenMod in particular was when the story broke the an American company was actively encouraging carriers to use a special monitoring system that cooperated with the necessary phone-side code baked into the firmware. This caused shock waves, ironically dwarfed by PRISMgasm. I believe it was CarrierIQ. The current revelations blew the scope out of the water; it took me a while to even re-jog my memory using Google.

tvon• 13 years ago

The source of the boing boing post: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/08/apple-patents-wireless-ca...

He also mentions there are legitimate but less headline-worthy uses for this:

While the patent does use "covert police or government operations" as an example of an application, it also mentions legitimate applications, for example, stopping cameras in a locker room or other place where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

kennywinker• 13 years ago

I find the idea that there are legitimate uses for this technology a bit questionable.

There have been important photos taken in locker rooms.

There is a reasonable expectation of privacy at times, but it is enforced by social pressure, not a technology backdoor.

If someone really wants to take surreptitious locker room photos, they can, and do, find ways around tech like this. The inverse is also true. If someone has a legitimate reason to take a photo in a verboten place (locker room or protest) it's much more likely they will be stopped by this.

cransa• 13 years ago

Exactly. I think the best way to combat people who take pictures in places they shouldn't is by adding a camera sound that can't be disabled or turned down. I believe I read that's how it is in Japan.

cremnob• 13 years ago

It'd be pretty great if phones couldn't get make/get calls in movie theaters (aside from emergency calls).

mikegerwitz2• 13 years ago

It'd be pretty great if people were polite enough not to make/take calls in movie theaters.

Our devices should not dictate such a thing, unless the feature is a "hey, I recommend that you not be an asshole, but you can disable me if you really want".

superuser2• 13 years ago

"This is your sitter, I'm on the way to the hospital with your children" is an emergency call, although it doesn't come from 911.

Etiquette is the solution here, not technology. If there is a possibility of an emergency, put your phone on vibrate and if it wrings, silence it immediately, leave the theater, and call the person back from the lobby. Not hard.

mikegerwitz2• 13 years ago

While those uses may be ``legitimate'' in the sense that they enforce social norms, it is important that users are able to use their own discretion; laws exist---where appropriate (and sometimes not)---to help deter such things, but a citizen has a right to disobey that law if they so choose. If Apple decides to implement this technology, they are choosing enforcement before any legal process: They, or whomever is controlling such an anti-feature, are acting above the law, because these devices so heavily influence their users' lives.

Lawrence Lessig goes into the concept of social norms and the dangers of this type of enforcement in Codev2 (http://codev2.cc/); he summarizes it as follows:

Thus, four constraints regulate this pathetic dot—the law, social norms, the market, and architecture—and the “regulation” of this dot is the sum of these four constraints. Changes in any one will affect the regulation of the whole. Some constraints will support others; some may undermine others. Thus, “changes in technology [may] usher in changes in . . . norms,” and the other way around.

Who decides what is and is not a ``good'' time to use this anti-feature? The RIAA might want this feature enabled during concerts, for example, and try to compel Apple to do so---DRM in the real world. This is a slippery slope that one should not go down.

[...] stopping cameras in a locker room or other place where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Sort of like I have a reasonable expectation when using my personal devices?

minor_nitwit• 13 years ago

I could see this tech being a hit with theatres (that is - if they stick around.)

D9u• 13 years ago

Just what we need, more government intrusion into our lives. Yet another reason not to embrace proprietary technology.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

Yeah, that's not going to get abused at all.

alexcroox• 13 years ago

Patent != Feature

pazimzadeh2• 13 years ago

This is good. Apple is probably the least likely company to implement something like this, so the fact that they own this patent means that other companies may have a harder time implementing this feature.

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

Really. What has Apple ever done to make you think they value privacy more than say Nokia, Twitter, etc? Or, Aside from the fact that they don't do ad supported services, even Microsoft or Google?

The only thing I see them doing is deploying a allegedly end to end encrypted messaging system that rather clearly isn't[0], and participating in "PRISM" while loudly asserting their system is secure. I'd actually say this puts them in a worse position than say Google or Microsoft, since neither of them ever claimed to provide end to end security and in the case of Skype admitted as much in their ToS.

[0] http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/icloud-who-h...

pazimzadeh2• 13 years ago

Apple makes money by selling hardware and software, whereas Google and Twitter make money selling ads, which incentivizes them not to encrypt our data so that it can more easily be used to target users. Or at least that's what this post seems to imply: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/11/two-honest-google-employ....

I'm not convinced that this story is necessarily reliable, but it's better than the reverse: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessag....

And in Apple's statement on privacy: https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/.

"For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form."

As John Gruber says, "That last sentence separates Apple from many other companies." (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/06/17/apple-privacy)

josephscott• 13 years ago

Not sure why this is being covered again. The patent is from last year. There were plenty of articles about it back then, here is one - http://www.zdnet.com/apple-patent-could-remotely-disable-pro...

shiven• 13 years ago

Perhaps, because the inventions covered by this patent are patently relevant to social issues of the day. (Pun un-intended.)

tzs• 13 years ago

This was widely covered over two years ago, when the patent application was published. Boing Boing was among those that covered it [1].

It was also widely covered a year ago, when the patent issued. Again, Boing Boing covered it [2]. That article was written by the same author as the present article. In that article, he mentioned likely legitimate uses (movie theaters), and said that the paranoid side of him imagined government might use it for bad purposes.

This new article seems to be redundant. Everything it says was already covered in their second article.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2011/06/16/apple-patents-mobile.html

[2] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/30/apple-granted-patent-for-lo...

glenra3• 13 years ago

Bogus article. If you read the actual patent ( http://www.google.com/patents/US8254902 ), the quote about some police activity requiring complete blackout conditions is actually in reference to the screen brightness, not the cameras. One aspect of the idea seems to be that the phones OF THE COPS would be able to go dark in response to a central command. It has nothing to do with turning off the cameras of citizen-journalists.

(jwz nails it here: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/oh-noes-apple-has-patented-b... )

Here is the full paragraph from which the misleading sentence was yanked:

Excessive lighting emanating from wireless devices can also create disruption in dark environments. While it is well known that excessive or bright lighting in a movie theater can spoil the mood of certain movies, excessive lighting can also become a more serious issue in other contexts. For example, darkrooms used to develop film can only tolerate very low amounts of ambient lighting. Some biological labs also require low levels of lighting in certain instances (for example, as in the growth of light-sensitive bacteria). Covert police or government operations may require complete “blackout” conditions. A person's sleep can even be interrupted by a bright flashing or modulating display (such as to indicate an incoming call).

cageface4• 13 years ago

Try again.

From the description:

This policy enforcement capability is useful for a variety of reasons, including for example to disable noise and/or light emanating from wireless devices (such as at a movie theater), for preventing wireless devices from communicating with other wireless devices (such as in academic settings), and for forcing certain electronic devices to enter “sleep mode” when entering a sensitive area.

glenra3• 13 years ago

Same error here. You're reading a meaning into the undefined phrase "sensitive area" from the abstract that doesn't seem consistent with that term's use elsewhere in the patent. But if you grep "sensitive" and look at the other uses it seems to mean primarily (a) places where light or sound would annoy or frustrate, (b) situations like wanting to control EMF levels in a hospital or airplane to avoid adverse effects (c) security issues related to "enterprise" applications.

There's actually a REASON we can know that this patent isn't trying to cover the specific case of turning off cameras in places where The Man doesn't want us to have that capability. The reason is: somebody else (not Apple) had ALREADY previously patented that explicit use case.

This patent is about adjusting general system settings, especially ringer volume, display brightness, and communications settings, in a way appropriate to the venue. For instance, pairing bluetooth when you get in your car and then turning that feature off again when you get out of your car. The vast majority of it really shouldn't be patentable because it's too obvious to any practitioner in the field. The general thrust of it is NOT about preventing phone users from photographing the police and it's not clear anything in THIS patent would even make it easier for the police to have that capability. (You have to do a fair amount of reading between the lines to even make that connection.)

In short: the original article is still linkbait.

cageface4• 13 years ago

Also this :

Additionally, the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security.

glenra3• 13 years ago

Sorry, but that is in the "description of related technology" section. Meaning it helps establish the CONTEXT of the present patent but is not itself part OF the present patent.

abalone• 13 years ago

Pure 100% linkbait.

If you actually read the patent the one place where they mention government blackout is clearly in the context of the agents of the government blacking out their own devices so as not to give themselves away, not some sort of "kill switch" for their targets. It is like a more extreme version of the mute switch.

All the things describes in the patent pertain to opting-in to policies that shut down aspects of the phone in certain environments.

Apple patents tech that lets government disable iPhone video, camera and wi-fi

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