Since today’s phones feature increasingly slim, light batteries, the possibility of people becoming suspicious of something being amiss with the batteries before installation could go up. See: Your Smartphone and Laptop Battery Invading Your Privacy

That’s especially important if a person buys one of the altered batteries to replace it with the factory-installed version and can immediately compare the two. Plus, the battery cannot be overly dense or have other characteristics that might lead someone to believe it has additional parts. For example, they must fit the power tracer and the processing device that retrieves and sends the data inside the battery. The hacked battery would include an activity detector, too, that could tell when a person started using the phone, then proceed to filter the respective activities.Īlthough the hack is undoubtedly dangerous once the battery gets into a phone, the researchers also explored the obstacles hackers could encounter in the preliminary stages. For example, if a person frequently visited websites about Orlando, Florida, and then began looking at flight routes, it makes sense they’re probably planning a trip to that city. They could then make certain inferences about individuals’ behaviors. Plus, the battery could be capable of continuous monitoring, giving hackers the opportunity to see almost all the things the targets do with their phones, whether that’s browsing the internet, typing on the phone’s keyboard or receiving calls.Īlso, if the battery had a DRAM or GPU power tracer inside it, a hacker could tell which websites people visit by using an artificial intelligence algorithm that matches power flows to particular keystrokes. It could happen in a scenario where a hacker sets up an online store and entices users with promises of extra-long battery life and low prices, sends a purchaser the battery and waits for it to become installed on the phone to begin the tracking segment of the hack. They say smartphone owners may even participate in helping the hacks happen by installing malicious batteries themselves. The researchers who authored a paper on the subject of smartphone batteries capable of spying on people pointed out that this hack would be quick to implement and difficult to detect. That advantage sounds excellent all around, but recent research suggests those smart batteries could be used by hackers to learn about smartphone users. Most batteries in today’s smartphones are intelligent enough to detect how people use their phones and employ power-saving technologies that result in longer battery life.

Does your cell phone battery spy on you