Hello.
Our smartphones are such personal devices that we trust them all our lives: experiences, communication with other people, the chronology of events. Many take their lives responsibly, hide data behind passwords, biometrics, and this is the right approach. But at the same time, going about our business on the phone, we forget that we live surrounded by other people who can voluntarily or involuntarily spy on us.
The motive for the discussion was the situation when I saw a couple of photos in one of the closed chats. The woman is filmed from the back, the screen of her phone is separately filmed. Shooting from several meters, obviously a tenfold optical zoom, which allows you to read everything that is written on the screen. The shooter was curious and nothing more, however, this is definitely an invasion of someone else’s life.
Let’s imagine that there was something like that on the screen. How easy is it to find a person by their photo? It will take fifteen minutes at most, after which you will know exactly who is in front of you. And in life there are dozens of situations in which people, without hesitation, themselves share their personal data, which they themselves are strenuously protecting. At the Azbuka Vkusa checkout, many people have adopted a simple habit – not to show the barcode of the loyalty card, but to speak their phone number out loud. Everyone around hears it, they can easily remember it. Sometimes someone dictates their number deliberately loudly, the girl is trying so hard to get to know the guy who is standing next to her. The guy is stupid and looks at the rack of chocolates, he has headphones in his ears. Knowing the number is not God knows what, but given that most people have all their accounts, bank and the like connected to this number, in theory it is possible to cause trouble. Read the story about the spammer who tried to give me a lot of trouble.
In a big city, situations constantly arise when strangers look into the phone screen. I’m sitting in a cafe, with peripheral vision I see that the girl at the next table is looking at the photos that I flip through on the Fold screen. It is clear that the big screen, everything is clearly visible, but the interest seems tactless. In transport, this happens all the time, people see other people’s screens on which correspondence, messages and something else. One scene was especially memorable: the guy is looking at some half-naked girls, and the middle-aged woman standing behind him in the subway car winces and shows her displeasure. Sometimes the guy lowers the phone, the pictures are visible to everyone around. And then the question arises, does it invade our personal space, showing, albeit unconsciously, such photos, or everything is fine and, conversely, we do not need to look at someone else’s screen. Asked this question in the Telegram channel, find the poll can be here.
The attraction of someone else’s apparatus is unambiguous for many, and looking at what a person does, what he writes, what he watches is entertainment. The temptation to peek through the keyhole. At the same time, there is a completely tolerable excuse: you are in a public place and in the same subway car you may not even be able to turn away, you have to look at someone else’s screen during rush hour.
People cannot avoid someone else’s and interested peeping, moreover, they do not always understand how much their safety is under threat. Let me give you another example, the current generation of surveillance cameras gives a high resolution picture, some establishments have cameras with a resolution of 4K. That allows not only to get a very high-quality picture with those who came to eat or relax, but to read everything that happens on their screens. In the City, a number of security services of large companies advise top managers not to take out their phones in a number of places, since all the contents of the screens will be available to everyone without exception. Cameras can record everything that happens on the screens, moreover, the same unlock patterns are read with a bang.
There is only one guaranteed way to avoid such attention – to train yourself not to use the phone in public places or to occupy yourself with toys that are not interesting for others. Every day there will be more and more places in cities where cameras will learn to “read” phone screens, and someone will be able to just peep what you are doing. At the beginning, I talked about how someone took a picture of someone else’s screen and invaded that person’s life. But imagine that he will do it non-stop, others will pay attention to it. Another thing is if there are cameras that are perceived as part of the landscape, and they will read phone screens. Interestingly, no manufacturer of 4K cameras has yet added privacy zones, does not remove the picture from the screens of phones, as this is one of the advantages of collecting data. And many still burn with the desire to spy on other people.
In everyday life, exactly the same picture, why hack a person’s phone, if it is enough to install several cameras that will read the contents of the screen. A couple of days is enough to find out everything a person thinks about and discusses without invasive methods regarding the phone. There are more and more stories like this.
I am not interested in the contents of other people’s phones, I try to avoid peeping, but sometimes life forces me. I am sitting at a presentation, a girl is sitting in front of me, who is doing her own thing – sorting things out with the bank, looking at online stores, looking for information about venereal diseases. In half an hour I learn a lot of information about this person, and it is not interesting to me, but I unwittingly got it at my disposal. The fact that I later looked into the social networks of this girl gives a special piquancy to this story. In them, she builds a completely different person out of herself – with a different social level, different interests, and so on. It’s funny.
The main idea that I want to convey to you is that there are no public places where your phone screen is protected. If you want to protect yourself – buy polarized glasses that do not allow you to read your screen, reduce the brightness of the screen. There are no other guaranteed ways to avoid unwanted attention today. Unless you cultivate the idea that you cannot use the phone as freely as usual outside the home.
In a big city it is now impossible to hide who you are, you can find out in a matter of minutes. Finding your phone number is also easy. I’ll give you another example. The other day I found someone else’s bank card on the ground, it was apparently accidentally dropped. In a couple of minutes, he recognized the girl’s phone, warned that he had found the card and now I would throw it in the trash, since it was compromised, the owner needed to restore her card. The girl was silent for a long time, she could not digest what I was saying to her. The most interesting thing about this problem was that the last name and first name on the map were very common (ordinary Russians), so the search was not banal. But it was not difficult to find the girl, the data that she posted about herself turned out to be more than enough.
We are not aware of the volumes of information that we ourselves provide to the outside world, how easy it is to find and count us. This is not a call to hide at all – only to be more attentive to what you are doing and how. I think that with the proliferation of high-resolution cameras, smartphones with a zoom of x10 and higher, you should be more careful about communicating outside the home.
2023-08-07 21:01:00
#Deceptive #privacy #phone #Screen #peeking
