Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2015, as a news item about a viral social media hoax. The ‘hundreds of thousands’ of users sharing videos is the source’s own unsourced estimate.
“We’ve finally caught you out. You’ve put hidden microphones in phone batteries to listen to all our conversations.” That must be what hundreds of thousands of users are thinking as they share videos showing a “microphone” under the label on their mobile phone battery, even though it is actually the NFC antenna, as Samsung’s own support page explains.
I’d be ready to guarantee that all our conversations are stored somewhere, but unfortunately for the people who made this discovery, what appears under the battery label is not a microphone: it’s the antenna for NFC technology.
NFC is an innovative technology used to send files from one phone to another and to connect to various external devices, and it is key to making payments with digital wallets.
One of the videos going round on Facebook came with a caption along the lines of “Here’s the proof: they spy on all our conversations and photos”.
The “discovery” has spread like wildfire on social media, and since nobody likes having their privacy invaded, thousands of users are getting rid of NFC by pulling the antenna off the battery, a feature they paid a bit extra for when they bought their smartphone.
So, for now at least, there’s no need to keep breaking your phones. These days, nobody who wants to spy on you needs to plant a microphone that any user could find.
Featured image: treaki, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
