Cellphone surveillance

In the United States, the FBI has used "roving bugs", which entails the activation of microphones on mobile phones to the monitoring of conversations.

Some hidden cellphone bugs rely on Wi-Fi hotspots, rather than cellular data, where the tracker rootkit software periodically "wakes up" and signs into a public Wi-Fi hotspot to upload tracker data onto a public internet server.This is also legal Governments may sometimes legally monitor mobile phone communications - a procedure known as lawful interception.

[15] In the United States, the government pays phone companies directly to record and collect cellular communications from specified individuals.

[15] U.S. law enforcement agencies can also legally track the movements of people from their mobile phone signals upon obtaining a court order to do so.

[2] These invasive legal surveillance can cause a change in public behaviors directing our ways of communication away from technology based devices.

[12] Kostas Tsalikidis, a Vodafone-Panafon employee, was implicated in the matter as using his position as head of the company's network planning to assist in the bugging.

[21][22] During the coronavirus pandemic Israel authorized its internal security service, Shin Bet, to use its access to historic cellphone metadata[23] to engage in location tracking of COVID-19 carriers.

[30][38][47] However, sophisticated surveillance methods can be completely invisible to the user and may be able to evade detection techniques currently employed by security researchers and ecosystem providers.

[48] Preventive measures against cellphone surveillance include not losing or allowing strangers to use a mobile phone and the utilization of an access password.