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[–] 135 points 11 months ago (5 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?

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  • [–] 73 points 11 months ago (2 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.

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Maybe not eye tracking, but probably head tracking.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months 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.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months 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.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [+] -28 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 28 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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.

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