Bill Heavey started writing for Field & Stream in the 1990s and slowly faked his way into an editor-at-large title. He has written four books about the outdoors, including If You Didn’t Bring Jerky, What Did I Just Eat?
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Research shows that microphones on digital assistants are sensitive enough to record what someone is typing on a smartphone to steal PINs and other sensitive info.
The potential for digital-home assistants like Amazon Alexa to infringe on user privacy by making and saving voice recordings of them is already widely known. Now researchers have discovered that the devices also may be able to “hear” and record what people are typing on nearby smartphones, even amid background noise.
The microphones on digital assistants are sensitive enough that they can record the taps people make on a mobile device when sitting up to a foot and a half away, according to a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge. The researchers constructed an attack in which they used this capability to identify PINs and text typed into a smartphone.