I never get why cell phones don’t have the indicator light that tells you the camera is on. Ideally this light would be physically linked to the power going to the camera and the light would be impossible to disable without physically altering the device.
I’d like the same for the microphone.
I think location based stuff is a little more instantaneous in turn harder to accomplish but generally speaking more indicators that cannot be disabled with software tightly coupled with sensors potentially violating our privacy.
> I never get why cell phones don’t have the indicator light that tells you the camera is on.
Reduces BOM, manufacturing cost, board space needed, and battery drain to exclude it.
LEDs on phones were all the rage (at least one Blackberry model had an LED accessible by apps IIRC) until Apple took the market by storm and then everyone started copying their aesthetic.
> Ideally this light would be physically linked to the power going to the camera and the light would be impossible to disable without physically altering the device.
There's no way for you to verify unless you built the camera yourself or can remove the camera.
Many phones have LEDs but do not have software support for it. Sometimes it goes a long time before someone recognizes that a LED hides in the speaker grill and then boom, someone writes an app to enable it. The manufacturer was contempt with adding a LED to a device and not caring if it ever was used. Cost was not part of it.
Even google, on it's nexus 5, had a LED. A prominent RGB LED that could do everything you ever wanted. Well, unless you relied on google for the software which if possible made it worse than if it hadn't existed.
Then you open up the phone to replace the dying battery. And behold, multiple SMA type connectors for external antennas(?) One wonders if a single person on earth found a use for them. Cost optimization don't seem to be that important.
Now for the camera LED I don't think phone manufacturers want to even admit that it is something anyone should be worried about. So their strategy is likely to pretend that there doesn't even exist any issues to worry about. Probably works out pretty well for them.
The microphone isn't powered, so there's no way to do something as direct as you're asking for. A light indicating that it's "listening" would necessarily have to be controlled by software at some level.
It turns out the microphone modules used in smartphones have integrated preamp and ADC circuitry which needs to be powered.
This makes a lot of sense as mobile phones are an extremely hostile RF environment. If it were any other way, the phone's sound inputs would be flooded with that iconic "cell phone interference" sound.
