Naomi Wu’s Microphone-Jamming Choker Thwarts Paparazzi and Eavesdropping Devices

There is plenty of debate about which specific companies are spying on you, the specific devices they’re spying with, and how much data they’re collecting, but it is undeniable that data is constantly being gathered about you and that the situation is only going to get worse. The majority of the population seems to have just accepted this as the price to pay for convenience, but privacy is important to some people. Taking a page from the paparazii-fighting playbook utilized by some celebrities, Naomi Wu, AKA “RealSexyCyborg,” built this microphone-jamming choker that makes it difficult for recording devices to monitor what she says.

You may have seen some celebrities wearing “paparazzi jackets,” which are coats covered in highly-reflective material. When someone tries to take a photo of the wearer, the camera flash reflects off of the jacket and ruins the exposure of the photo, essentially making the picture unusable. This choker works in a similar manner, by emitting ultrasonic soundwaves that overwhelm any nearby microphones that might be recording. Because the choker only produces high-frequency ultrasonic soundwaves, the wearer and other people in the vicinity won’t hear it. Even though this is active jamming, it is still unobtrusive to anyone who isn’t recording audio. However, dogs and other animals with a higher range of hearing than humans might hear the sound.

Wu’s choker design was based on a Wearable Microphone Jamming device created by a team of researchers from the University of Chicago. Their device was designed as a bracelet, but Wu went full cyberpunk and made hers into a choker that would have fit perfectly on the set of Hackers. Her choker is lined with an array of ultrasonic transducers. Each of those emits a fairly narrow cone of ultrasonic soundwaves, which is why so many transducers are required. You may be thinking that the recorded audio can be recovered by simply filtering out the high frequencies, but the ultrasonic soundwaves are strong enough to bleed over into the audible spectrum when they hit a microphone. Even with filtering, the audio is too distorted to be useful — particularly for computers to understand. Wu designed her choker in TinkerCAD and then 3D-printed it. The transducers are mounted to that 3D-printed frame, which she can then strap to her neck. Now whenever the jammer is turned on, Wu can be sure that no microphones are able to successfully record what she says.