4 ms·
Would you be able to access screen taps from another app in the background?
by anfractuosity 9y ago
Would you be able to access screen taps from another app in the background?
- yorwba 9y agoI think step counters depend on being able to read accelerometer data. You might be able to add enough noise to the signal to make tap localization impossible while still keeping steps detectable, but that requires careful tuning.
- djrogers 9y agoOn iOS at least, most ‘step counter’ apps don’t acually do the step counting - they just pull the data from HealthKit, as the phone is already tracking them.
- skoocda 9y agoYou're only accessing accelerometer / gyro data here, so yes this could occur in the background. On iPhone it restricts background activity after 10 minutes, but on Android you'd have free reign until they manually close the app.
- anfractuosity 9y agoWait sorry, I thought the person I replied to was referring to accessing screen tap x,y coords from the OS. Sorry, looks like I misunderstood them (didn't notice they were referring to the paper).
- skoocda 9y agoOh my mistake, it was actually I who misread the first comment. Regardless, I don't think a screen tap logger would be necessary in many cases, since you could just open the keyboard on the phone and manually check the bounding boxes for each key. Making this work on N phones would be more difficult, but not unfeasible. You'd probably just need to know a few things about the phone (resolution, screen size), and it wouldn't be hard to find that information. Would be especially easy to just target the limited iPhone line.