iPhone is taking your picture every 5 seconds | Hacker News Reader

iPhone is taking your picture every 5 seconds

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22 pointshosteur8 comments

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208245:

“Even if you don’t enroll in Face ID, the TrueDepth camera on iPhone X or later, or iPad Pro 11-inch or iPad Pro 12.9-inch intelligently activates to support attention aware features. For example, When you’re looking at your device, your display will not dim until you stop looking at your device. If you're looking at your device, it will lower the volume sound of your alerts.

If you don’t want to use these features, go to Settings > Face ID & Passcode and turn off Attention Aware Features.”

There's an option in Settings to use attention-aware features, like dimming the screen faster if you're not paying attention. I imagine disabling that feature would turn this off.

Pretty sure that is not enabled by default. I can't recall disabling it, and I looked now in Settings to find it disabled.

The video (and even more the comments) suggests that there is something shady going on.

But how else would the phone detect that there is a face? It's the same with Siri, Amazon Echo etc constantly listening (you can't hear the trigger word without listening).

The real test if something shady is going on is monitoring the network traffic if any of these data is transmitted to an Apple server.

I suspect the 5s interval picture has to do with figuring out if anyone is looking at the phone and get a better sense of when to turn off the screen.

Apple constantly and proudly state that they do most of their processing on the device so network monitoring likely wouldn't tell you much. In this light it doesnt sound as good no matter if anything happens or not.

why wouldn't it sound as good? I don't care if the phone takes a million pictures of me, as long as the data doesn't get transmitted without my explicit permission.

Because if it is on device you can't prove how or if it's used either way. You are sounding very defensive? I didn't state if they did something bad or not with the data. I only state that never being able to prove if it is used in bad ways doesn't sound as good as when Apple says "amazingly we do it all on the device" which is clearly meant as "unlike Google".

> "we discovered, which we already knew..."

This sounds incoherent and conspirationist, but also pascalian: a religious experience. ("You wouldn't be looking for Me if you hadn't already found Me".)

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