Eye-Tracking Phone Monitors Your Every Blink
Good news for people for whom touchscreens are too much effort. A new Samsung phone with eye-tracking technology will apparently be released next week.
But those weary of large corporations and the increase in privacy-encroaching technology might not think of the innovation is a positive. After all, if telephone companies now have the ability to track our eye movements, what’s to stop them from tracking other sensitive information or, worse, move on to track the final frontier: our thoughts.
Scheduled to be available to the public on March 14, the Samsung S4 will allow users to scroll down pages or even flip them using only their eyes… isn’t that mind-reading right there?
For those who were unaware, the Galaxy S3 already had “eye-tracking” technology, but it was pretty rudimentary. Instead of being able to monitor eye movements, the S3 used a basic camera to detect if there was a human face facing the phone or not. That only allowed for the basic use of powering the phone off, when no face was visibly detected. (Samsung S4 previously denied some of these rumors, but they appear to confirm them in the latest press releases.)
But the S4’s capabilities seem more revolutionary and, well, frightening. As Slate points out:
“It probably won’t be long before terms of service for some mobile apps get revised to allow collection and resale of eye-tracking data. Clicking ‘accept’ when downloading a new app may mean agreeing to have your eye movements sent to the cloud, analyzed, aggregated with other data collected from your device, and then resold into the mobile marketing ecosystem.”
That means that in the not so distant future, companies might keep a log of how many snuff porn films, or worse, how many Justin Bieber photos your eyes have glanced over.
Coming off the news that scientists have linked the brains of rats a thousand miles apart, what’s to stop eye-tracking technology from opening the floodgates for something more sinister? Marketing people, after all, are constantly after your thoughts―what you want, when do you want it, how do you want it.
Will they one day be able to mind-track your very thoughts through your own smartphone? And will we let them?
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Image: Claudia Cruz
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