You may think of your phone as a tool for communication, entertainment and productivity, but it's also a gateway for authorities to spy on you. Indeed, France is not the only country to have passed a law allowing the police to take remote control of suspects' devices, with access to cameras, microphones and GPS data.

The French Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, welcomed the adoption of new legislation authorizing this type of espionage for a maximum period of six months, with the authorization of a judge, in cases where the penalties incurred are at least five years old. "We are a long way from the totalitarianism of 1984," he added. "Human lives will be saved."

Obviously, the fact that a police or government agent could hack into your phone and casually observe a live stream of your life sounds like the most obscene invasion of privacy. And clearly, this opens the door to occasional abuses of civil liberties by those in positions of power, as well as more targeted abuses of that power by actors in bad faith.

But this practice is far from new, let alone rare. In 2006, before the release of the first iPhone, the US FBI remotely activated cellphone microphones (even with the phones turned off) and listened to suspects, completely legally. Back then, you could still remove the batteries from many phones. Now not so much.

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