Hi people.

I suspect my office might be bugged. How should I detect hidden cams and mics?

    • aMockTie@piefed.world
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      2 days ago

      Check smoke detectors, clocks, plants near desks, anything that’s always been there and nobody questions.

      To add to this as someone who has seen behind the curtain of how much of this tech is set up, lights are a common hiding place for cameras. Exit signs, parking lot lights, motion sensor lights, and the like. These are unfortunately also very difficult to detect by design, since they are expected to consume electricity, are almost always closed circuit with data wires parallel to the power wires, are practically impossible to observe in low light, and generate some heat even without any included surveillance equipment.

      • Zoot@reddthat.com
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        4 hours ago

        Smoke detector cams are unlikely to be used by any professional company installing them, though that only stops people already following the law. I only mention it since my old camera and security company actually used to keep some lying around, with the story being that they became extremely illegal due to smoke detectors needing to function as smoke detectors or the fire marshal will give you a really bad year

        • somegeek@programming.devOP
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          1 day ago

          One of the owners thinks one of the business partners that comes in their office might have bugged the office. They get lots of unattended time there, and they’re a shady and bad person overall so it’s probable.

          • Lemmchen@feddit.org
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            1 day ago

            It was the account that posted about Huntarrr yesterday or so and suggested measures against something like that which wouldn’t have been effective in the slightest. Everyone suspected them to be an AI account.

            • FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works
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              1 day ago

              I don’t know if it was a bot account or not. Maybe? If it was, I got fooled by it once. It replied to one of my posts in another thread. I felt the reply was insightful and made a valid point. Of course, it could still have been a bot. Or maybe a person falsely accused as a bot? I legit have no idea.

              I worry that over time it will get harder and harder to detect bots by content, and attempts to do that based on meta-info will further erode privacy. It always risks sweeping up real humans. Especially those with a more formal writing style. I have changed my own writing style to try to avoid that. As somebody on the spectrum I always wrote with a very bullet-list style, sometimes even using sub-heading in longer posts to structure them. That is exactly what bots do. So I now I don’t!

              There are “LLM detectors”, but those have poor accuracy. then there are “humanizers” who try to modify writing to avoid triggering the LLM detectors. It’s a mess.