November 2, 2005
Cellphone chaperone
Favorite Barry Fox, trawls the world's weird and wonderful patent applications and publishes online on New Scientist. One of this week's scary finds is an innocent-looking cellphone from Sony-Ericsson also works like a remote bugging device.
"It’s always good to know that a baby-sitter, elderly relative or child out late is carrying a cellphone. But it’s also worrying when they don’t answer a "just-checking" call.
The new device provides a simple solution. Software on the handset checks the number of each incoming call against an address list, to see if the caller has been previously flagged. If they have, the phone rings in the usual way but switches to auto-answer after a predetermined number of rings. So the called phone becomes a live microphone listening to whatever is happening nearby."
[via Engadget and Smart Mobs]
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2005/11/010474.htm