An emerging form of surveillance, “wireless-tapping,” explores the possibility of remotely deciphering conversations from the tiny vibrations produced by a cellphone’s earpiece.
With the goal of protecting users’ privacy from potential bad actors, a team of computer science researchers at Penn State demonstrated that transcriptions of phone calls can be generated from radar measurements taken up to three meters, or about 10 feet, from a phone.
While accuracy remains limited — around 60% for a vocabulary of up to 10,000 — the findings raise important questions about future privacy risks. more
