259
Ontario Police Deploy Secret Spyware That Lets Them Remotely Take Over Your Phone
(www.gadgetreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
259 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
86354 readers
3227 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you turn your phone off when being pulled over would it make any difference or does the spyware still do its thing?
More than likely yes. It disables biometrics and forces the use of a passcode if you have one enabled.
On Apple devices and Android devices go into lockdown mode when they are restarted.
Both of them will when left idle for a select period of time it will reboot. This is called Inactivity reboot. This basically forces the phone into lockdown mode.
These are new features that have been implemented on Apple and Android respectively fairly recently.
Apple phones also have the ability to wipe themselves away when left off for too long. You can do this with some versions of android but for the most part the one I know of is Graphene OS.