Your very keyboard clicks and other keyboard sounds can give away what you are typing. That is the unsettling conclusion made by researchers at UC Berkeley this week, who announced that keyclicks and other keyboard sounds can be acoustically spied on and used to determine what is being typed.

Explains Doug Tygar, a UC Berkeley Computer Science Professor involved with the study, “It’s a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts.”

The way that it works is horribly simple. You record or otherwise capture keyboard sounds, and feed them into a computer. That’s what the researchers did, taking snippets of ten minutes of audio of people typing away, and feeding the audio into a computer program which detected the slight differences between each keystroke. Once you know…

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