[twiss]

I don't think it's easy to not carry a phone, nowadays. Let's say I'm meeting up with someone: I'll need to use navigation, potentially message them if I'm running late, and so on.

Then once I'm there, what do I do with the phone? Ask to put it in a separate room and hope that the microphone isn't powerful enough to pick up our conversation?

I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?

For me, as a user, the easiest solution would be to have a killswitch. I understand that building it would be more work, of course :)

[mkayokay]

> Ask to put it in a separate room...

Yes, that's what I had to do for meetings that the organizer thought were important enough. Also, in very sensitive areas special rooms with anti-eavesdropping gear are common [1].

> I could turn it off entirely, but what if someone needs to call me for an emergency?

But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;)

Don't get me wrong, I think a killswitch can make a lot of sense for highly sensitive areas (R&D, politics, military, ...), but I don't think Fairphone 6 are the devices that target this demographic and thus should not include one. Furthermore, current "offline" measure seem to mitigate the problem okay enough to not need such a killswitch - else we would already have phones with such features. And lastly, killswitches can only mitigate parts of the features modern spyware [2] implements and does not protect from simple human-based errors like the United States government group chat leaks [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...

[twiss]

> But you would also not be reachable if the killswitch is active ;)

I would be, because I asked for a killswitch for the microphone and cameras, not a killswitch for connectivity like the original comment.

If I get a call while the killswitch is active, I can stop the sensitive conversation, turn on the microphone, and answer the call.