On the website Securityaffairs.co, Pierluigi Paganini announced that Snowden said he doesn't use iphones because of spyware that can listen in to his conversations and track him. It is presented as "news."
Snowden doesn't use iPhone for security reasons | Security Affairs
I'm not sure this is real news. When the iphone first came out AT&T established a corporate policy that no business was to be done on an iphone because of security leaks. I believe the security flaws have been known for many years.
We really do need a trusted entity that we can turn to to make sure our devices are safe from malware. It would be nice if we could trust a Government agency to tell us if our devices have spyware, however, now we know that many of the spyware systems are actual creations of the Government. Those spyware systems are "released into the wild" in order to hope that suspects might get them installed on their device and allow government or police to listen in or track the owner of the device. Can we trust Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft or Google? Those companies say they are trying to patch "zero day" vulnerabilities as soon as they are recognized. However it is clear that those businesses can be bullied by Government agencies. In addition, those businesses want to keep our information unencrypted and on their servers so they can search through our collections of mail, music, video, and geographic locations in order to better target their advertising. That is clearly a conflict of interest! Could we trust a Consumer's Union type of company? An anti-virus company such as Symantec or Kaspersky?
Device manufacturers could provide positive, physical disconnect capability for gps, cameras and microphones, but they are trying to keep the cost and complexity of their device down, and possibly receive pressure from governments to not make it easy to disable those features on the devices they sell.
