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Comment by Gh0stRAT | Hacker News Reader

I mean, the light makes it VERY apparent when it's recording or taking a picture.

Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand? It'd be much easier to surreptitiously record/photograph someone with a phone because they have no status indicator when they're recording and people inadvertently point phone lenses at each other all the time.

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I've never had lunch with someone who was sitting there pointing their phone camera at me.

With modern wide angle lenses, it doesn't even need to be pointed directly at you to get you completely in the frame.

I don't know. Its weird. Kind of like how people have the "someone's staring at you" sense.

> The biological phenomenon is known as “gaze detection” or “gaze perception.” Neurological studies have found that the brain cells that initiate this response are very precise. If someone turns their gaze off of you by turning just a few degrees to their left or right, that eerie feeling quickly fades.

I 100% beleive we also do this with smartphones. You can 100% detect when a smartphone is looking at you or just being held in your direction. It might not be proven scientifically yet but I know this in my soul.

Similar to our ability to determine what someone else is looking at. We can watch someone's purpils move, and then immediately look at the exact area they looked at.

Also, gaze detection extends beyond humans [1]. Citation mentions dogs, birds, and reptiles having some degree of it. In general, attention detection via gaze or body language would be an evolutionary advantage for any prey animal, and even a predator that is low in the overall food chain. Anecdotally, I’ve seen similar behavior in spiders, though the literature [2] tells me it’s not specifically gaze that a spider is detecting. I have hunted (to trap) spiders around my house who seem to change behavior (eg play dead) based on my attention, leading me to think that they know they are being hunted on some level well below cognition. Which, coming full circle, lines up with the literature on how crazy accurate human gaze detection is, seems like a very old, low-level function.

[1] https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-015-0204-z

[2] https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/some-recent-advance...

Nonsense. If someone is sitting in front of you and they are texting, the camera is pointing at you.

They don't sit there and point the camera at you for the entire lunch. I don't know what kind of people you have lunch with, but nobody holds their phone vertically and in your face when texting unless they have a serious social skills deficit. They tend to hold it a few inches above the table at a 45 degree angle, or even under the table.

> Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand?

the entire time?

of course - and I'd question my decision to invite them

unless they're sharing their screen with everyone (showing pics, etc) or taking a group pic, having their phone out and pointed at you for more than a few moments would be both uncomfortable and rude

if you place a phone face-down and have the macro lens recording, you could pretty easily see both people at a table.

What? No you can’t at all. Unless you got some mythical alien phone which doesn’t exist.

I am not aware of a commonly used phone with a 180 degree FOV macro lens, but regardless of how a phone on the table makes me feel, someone holding a phone up, pointing at me for all of lunch, would be rude and discomforting.

They could be pointing it mostly at the table (<45° angle) and you'd still be in frame without realizing.

I don't see how I could fail to notice that my fellow diner was rudely and discomfortingly holding or using their phone for the entire meal, or that they carefully balanced one end of their phone on top of stuff on the table at a 45 degree angle pointing towards me for no apparent reason

> I mean, the light makes it VERY apparent when it's recording or taking a picture.

Surely no one will figure out how to disable that light, right?

The page says it detects if the light is obscured and notifies the user in thatacse. That's doesn't sound quite the same as disabling camera in that case, but I imagine this is also one bit of metadata they collect and that could change in future versions..

I vote for a flip-cover that visibly shows that the camera lens is covered. Like clip-ons, taken to the next level of dork.

In some techno clubs they put a sticker to your camera lens, so you know that you aren't recorded

> someone who had their phone in their hand?

I feel like I have a good idea when someone is recording or not. Phone orientation and behavior is different.

With the macro lens mode on iPhones now, you can take a video of what’s directly in front of you while pointing the camera at a downward angle. There’s no way to tell a person doing that apart from a person who’s texting, other than looking at their screen.

I posted elsewhere in this thread but I think we can still detect this. There is a framing/tracking motion people do when recording that's not present when just texting or using the phone.

> Brain imaging has shown that the brain cells which are activated when a test subject can see that they are being stared at are distinct from the cells activated when the starer's eyes are averted away from the subject by just a few degrees

From Wikipedia[1], but I admit the claim is needing a citation but I feel strongly for the gaze detection argument at least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_staring_effect

Well in this hypothetical scenario, you are stationary (sitting across from each other) so there would be no tracking to notice.

Facebook doesn't have to record the data to process it does it?

Honestly, if someone is using their phone when I'm having lunch (or any social activity) with them, I'd be unlikely to have lunch with them again. They are clearly not interested in being social with me in the first place.

I'm sure this will be the first unhackable product in tech history. /s

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