3 ms·
What’s the privacy issue with accelerometer?
by sizzle 4y ago
What’s the privacy issue with accelerometer?
- Veliladon 4y agoBecause it can be used to roughly track location through 3D space. It's nowhere near as accurate as practically any other method but for "good enough" a lot of the time it'll do the job.
- codebje 4y agoOne I could think of is you could use accelerometer data to know if the phone is moving, and how: is it just being lifted and interacted with, is the user walking or running, are they in a car. For a high profile target you might also be able to track their approximate location if you know their starting point and their acceleration profile - speed up, slow down, turns, time taken. Enough, at least, to execute an ambush.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoWith enough data and a high SNR, you don't even need the starting point or the velocity profile. Just the turns and distances are enough in combination with a map to uniquely identify most journeys. The problem with applying that more globally is sensor drift.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago> Drawing from existing literature, we found that accelerometer data alone may be sufficient to obtain information about a device holder's location, activities, health condition, body features, gender, age, personality traits, and emotional state. Acceleration signals can even be used to uniquely identify a person based on biometric movement patterns and to reconstruct sequences of text entered into a device, including passwords. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3309074.3309076 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3309074.3309076
- cpv 4y agoThere was a research in 2011 about using the accelerometer to log your keystrokes https://www.extremetech.com/internet/92946-a-wiggly-approach-to-smartphone-keylogging https://www.extremetech.com/internet/92946-a-wiggly-approach...