you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 131 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Damn. “TikTok would like to access WiFi”

We need new permissions for this shit. WiFi can do presence detection and now heart rate? What next? Eye tracking?

  • source
  • hideshow 15 child comments
  • [–] 68 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I'm pretty sure applications can only send and receive data, with the finer details being handled by the OS.

    But yes, there should be a specific permission to access biometric information.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Maybe not eye tracking, but probably head tracking.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Apps watch how we move/rotate devices to understand whether we’re walking, resting, lying down, etc., I assume? (The most popular apps I mean with large data teams)

    Wish that stuff could be turned off unless it was e.g. a game that made legitimate use of the accelerometer.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Android throttles the hell out of WiFi requests since (I think) Android 9. You need to manually allow WiFi request spamming in developer options to let apps do something like determining location from it.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    WiFi can also do pretty precise location. Bluetooth/BLE even more precise (inches or less)

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] -26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think it can also detect our neural frequencies, aka 'read our minds'. That's why we see ads for things we thought about but never even searched for.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    https://www.neurology.columbia.edu/news/mind-reading-technology-can-turn-brain-scans-language

    We already live in a world with existing, functional mind-reading devices. There is even a device designed to help people that are suffering from ALS communicate by reading their thoughts, and has a privacy feature where the user can activate and deactivate the device by thinking a password in their mind, in order to allow them to still have private thoughts.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-brain-device-is-first-to-read-out-inner-speech/

    Phones are not fMRIs though.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment