Security News > 2021 > November > Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams

Recent model smartphones can be smarter still about finding hidden cameras in their vicinity, if they take advantage of time-of-flight sensors.

Sriram Sami, Bangjie Sun, and Sean Rui Xiang Tan, from National University of Singapore, and Jun Han from Yonsei University, describe how this might be done in a paper [PDF] titled "LAPD: Hidden Spy Camera Detection using Smartphone Time-of-Flight Sensors".

Surreptitious spying with hidden cameras has become a global concern, according to the boffins.

"Tiny hidden spy cameras placed in sensitive locations such as hotel rooms and lavatories are increasingly a threat to individual privacy globally," the research paper explains.

There are dedicated signal detection devices for finding hidden cameras and other electronics like the CC308+ and the K18, to say nothing of what can be done with open source Wi-Fi analysis software.

"From our comprehensive experiments, LAPD achieves an 88.9 per cent hidden camera detection rate, compared to just using the naked eye which yields only a 46.0 per cent hidden camera detection rate," the paper reads.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/11/18/smartphone_camera_detection/