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Comment by Tagbert | Hacker News Reader

If this is at all like the eye tracking in Vision Pro, it is only available to the OS and apps are not given access to the data.

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Until people complain that Apple is being anti-competitive by not making vision tracking open, or allowing third-party eye-tracking controls, etc. etc.

System one is, but advertisers could always roll their own and see if they can get away with "you can only view this content if you give us permission to use your camera".

This would not pass the App Review process

At least on iOS, I can't imagine that happening - apps are not allowed to demand you grant permissions unrelated to the actual functionality. From App Review Guidelines (5.1.1) Data Collection and Storage, (ii) Access:

> Apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access. For example, apps that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos.

Lots of iOS apps today really want to mine your address book, and constantly spam you with dialogs to enable it, but they don't go as far as disabling other features until you grant them access, because they'd get rejected once someone noticed.

It's not that hard to come with ways to circumvent system restrictions, after all, advertisers are a fierce adversary and have shown many clever ways of invading users privacy in web browsers and mobile apps. In the case of eye tracking I could see a situation where the system perhaps feeds the "malicious" app in question with a hint of which widget is being currently gazed by the user. You could then just build a giant grid of invisible widgets covering the whole app window and use that to reconstruct the all the eye tracking happening inside your app.

The system doesn't supply data like widget highlight states to apps for exactly that reason.

This is not about technical restrictions and finding weird legal loopholes, Apple's guidelines don't work that way. It's the spirit that matters, not the letter.

Fortunately apps in the EU don’t have to pass though Apple’s anticompetitive review process, so developers are free to ignore that rule if they simply distribute the app via an alternative store.

Unfortunately, poor Americans cannot taste the freedom that Europeans have to be abused by developers.

I was thinking similar (only without the snark); but then I realised this is almost certainly not compatible with GDPR.

Fortunately, the Americans who create these products extract more value from the EU than they invest, or they wouldn’t bother trading with you <3

Until the EU comes in and forces them to ‘open up’ the functionality in the name of ‘fairness’…

If you look at the current things the EU has forced them to open up (app distribution and NFC payments), both of them are things that Apple was already actively monetizing.

To compare this to a non-monetized accessibility feature is a bit disingenuous.

The whole notion of ‘fairness’ is that gatekeepers should allow others to compete on even footing. That can be fulfilled by granting EITHER everybody OR nobody access to the market (but not: only yourself).

for now - it is naive to think this is safe

Eye tracking has been on iOS for many years (as an option for faceid called attention).

Avoidable via iPhone SE3 and iPad Air, which both use TouchID.

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