im so unbelievably black-pilled on the hardware kill switch concept. you would notice if your phone was recording audio/video and uploading it... if your phone runs a sane OS with good security practices (sooo not any of the Linux mobile solutions rn) apps can't arbitrarily turn your modem/wifi on
idk, change my mind or something
@cas I couldn't care less about the security aspect, but I was actually surprised how much I use Librem 5's kill switches. They're so handy! Well, the cellular and WiFi ones at least, I don't think I have ever used the camera one for non-debugging purposes 😜
@cas What I want is the ability to power gate the modules, which has plenty of use-cases, but most importantly it gives me some control over black-boxed peripherals. Whether it's ultimately controlled by a hardware switch or the OS that I actually control doesn't make much difference - or at least that's what I used to think until I started using the L5 and noticed how convenient the switches are. The PinePhone ones are IMO mostly useless though (maybe aside of the UART one).
@dos right, i mean look you can turn all these clocks off, send an irq to kill the modem, keep it in reset....
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/sdm845.dtsi#L3314
there's no fundamental benefit to hardware switches from a privacy perspective