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Comment by spuz | Hacker News Reader

It's possible Facebook uses the accelerometer for bot detection or click fraud detection. They could use the data to help work out whether a human is interacting with the phone or a robot (do an image search of "click farm" if you want an idea of why this might work).

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Advertising and advertising fraud are possibly the worst thing that has happened to privacy in general. Advertisers fight against privacy protection so they can shove ever better targeted ads for shit we don't need down our throats, and fraudsters force advertisers to engage middle men that resort to even worse tactics than advertisers do just to clamp down a tiny bit on fraud.

As for the click farms - I would not be surprised if the next step will be gimbal mounts that mimic an actual human's movement...

I wonder how a Bayesian classifier would handle accelerometer data?

But why are people on this thread making excuses for it? I had no idea this was happening and certainly don't WANT this information to be recorded by Facebook. Do they know when I'm having sex if I leave the phone on my bed?

And given that who ever I am with might have Facebook on her phone, and it might be on my bed also...

That's pretty creepy.

> Do they know when I'm having sex if I leave the phone on my bed?

After reading TFA it sure sounds like they do.

As if click farms can’t spoof accelerometer already?

Or skip physical hardware altogether.

They do both. Mass simulators with faked sensor data as well as phones on racks manipulated by mechanical digits. A phone that never moves at all doesn’t detect former but it does detect the latter.

This is the #1 use in my experience. Anti-bot detection.

It's still a breach of privacy unless it's properly disclosed to the user, and there's a fair question to be asked as to whether the bot/non-bot detection can classify which "bot" it's looking at, and if so whether the same can be applied to track users.

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