During Prime Days I was dumb and bought some Chinese lamp because it was on sale. I gotta say, it’s actually awesome — with the app I can change colors, styles, and so on, and I really like it.
The account creation already bugged me, although I think it was only needed for the first startup. I deleted the account since then. The app is in deep sleep on my phone with zero permissions except Bluetooth.
What really bothers me, though, is the built-in microphone for voice commands — on a lamp! I don’t want someone listening to me. It’s too late to send it back, and I actually want to keep it.
Until now, I’ve just unplugged it from the outlet every time I don’t use it, but that’s very tedious. So, is there an easier way to completely disable the microphone? Does putting tape over it completely mute it? Or would I have to take it apart and desolder it — which I’m probably too lazy, impatient, and inexperienced to do? So is there maybe a smarter or brute force way to do it? im paranoid i dont want my fucking lamp listening to me. sometime i even turn of mic and cam acsess on my phone.
First take it apart and determine what form factor the microphone is.
Is it a through hole microphone with two pins that are soldered to the underside like this? If so it’s best to desolder it to prevent damaging the PCB. Use a soldering iron to heat up the pins and pull it out with pliers from the other side. If you don’t have a soldering iron and don’t want to buy one, I’ve also seen people using side cutters to cut off the solder joints and loosening the component enough for it to be pulled out through brute force without breaking the circuit board.
It might also be a surface mount microphone that, as the name suggests, is only soldered to the surface of the PCB. Might look something like this. These are pretty challenging for most people desolder especially if it’s close to other components, but they’re small enough that the solder pads don’t need a lot of force to break, so if you can get a good grip with pliers you should be able to just rip it off. Ideally twist it until you feel the solder joints snap and then pull straight up. It doesn’t really matter if you rip the pad off the circuit board since you don’t plan on soldering anything else to it. But what you do need to be careful of is if you peel off more of the copper traces than just the pad, which can damage other components.
No. Speech is surprisingly robust from an audio perspective and it’s entirely possible for audio not recognizable to humans as speech to still be decoded by speech recognition AI. The thing is even if this works 90% of the time and makes the audio completely unusable, you can never prove if your case is in that 10% where there’s juuust enough information for AI to detect. If you’re concerned about privacy to the point where you’re asking how to remove a microphone, I doubt you’ll accept that 10% chance anyway.