If you can’t trust the software, why would you trust the software? Am I supposed to rely on the hope that an attacker can take over some part of the OS, but not the one rendering a tiny blob in the status bar?
That’s cool, but on iPhones, there is no indicator LIGHT. Only part of the screen indicates it. And if they can trigger stuff on your phone, maybe a daemon that accidentally covers that part with black also appears, and you wouldn’t notice.
I think Snowden worked with someone to create a bulky,
apparatus that you could put your iphone into and it would
measure if any signals at all were coming from it.
“Hey Siri” is activated by the mic, which is always listening, but only for the key phrase. It’s not going through the OS in the traditional sense, hence the “light” only comes on when it starts to listen through the OS.
That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.
Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it
