To add to the discussion (without disagreeing on your main points); I think Jolla claiming a “user-configurable privacy switch” is already a carefully crafted formulation, as they aren’t claiming it to be a “security switch” (the one discussed here: Jolla Phone Pre-order campaign has started - #52 by hanswf ), or a hardware kill switch.
Whether a privacy switch is sufficient for a user amounts to the trust they invest in the OS, and what perils the user wants to protect themselves from.
For example, I entirely distrust Microsoft to protect my privacy. Therefore I use a physical privacy shutter on the webcam of my work laptop. However I reasonably trust my linux distro vendor to not spy on me so I don’t use such hardware protection on my GNU/linux computers.
For now, I only have reasons to trust that Jolla will act in good faith and do their best in implementing a privacy switch. One reason to trust Jolla is if they don’t have much of a plan B and have everything to lose if they betray our trust and get caught. And they know it.
My primary target with SFOS is therefore not to protect myself from Jolla lying to me, but from data leaks caused by commercial software that I cannot avoid using (e.g. Facebook app), but that I know will spy on me at the first opportunity and at every opportunity after that.
I believe commercial spyware won’t pull out hacker tricks able to evade Jolla’s privacy switch, for several reasons, but among those is that we are too small for them to spend any effort on us, and most likely they don’t even know Jolla or SFOS exist.
For these reasons, I don’t think I will be victim of targeted hacks that require as a protection to physically disconnect the hardware. Therefore, physically disconnecting the microphone is an excessive means for my needs. But additionally, a kill switch would also be pointless, because:
- if I though I could be victim of a high level spy operation, the correct solution would be to not install Facebook or not use a mobile phone at all;
- I obviously cannot physically disconnect the microphone when talking on the phone, which is also when most of the useful things any spies want to hear will be said. Generally, disconnecting the microphone when the phone is idle makes also little sense. Of course this will depend on the user’s individual scenario, but we have already seen the rise and fall of the TVs that used always-on webcams to observe the reactions of the users — it seems such level of spying it was not profitable after all.
A software switch as implemented by Jolla is actually a much better solution than a kill switch for the purpose of protection against commercial spyware — the point of using SFOS. One major peril SFOS users might want to protect themselves from is Android applications or maybe background browser tabs spying on them when talking on the phone or using the camera. This risk is averted by a software privacy switch, while a hardware kill switch won’t help.
