AI-Powered Radar Can Spy on Phone Calls from 10 Feet
August 14th, 2025Add it to the list…
Via: Interesting Engineering:
Believe it or not, your phone’s tiniest vibrations can reveal your conversations — thanks to AI.
A team of computer science researchers at Penn State has developed a startling new way to eavesdrop on phone calls remotely by decoding subtle vibrations emitted by a cellphone’s earpiece.
Using millimeter-wave radar combined with an AI speech recognition system, their setup can capture and transcribe conversations from up to 10 feet away with about 60% accuracy.
This breakthrough raises significant privacy concerns about the potential misuse of such emerging technologies.
The research builds on a 2022 project where the team achieved up to 83% accuracy in recognizing 10 predefined words using a similar approach.
The new work extends this capability to continuous speech transcription, though the accuracy is lower due to the complexity of decoding noisy radar data.
Things happen from time to time that make me think a tinfoil hat, with earflaps and sound insulation, is actually a good idea.