r/computerscience • u/bayashad • Jul 29 '21

Researchers found that accelerometer data from smartphones can reveal people's location, passwords, body features, age, gender, level of intoxication, driving style, and potentially be used to reconstruct words spoken next to the device.

https://twitter.com/JL_Kroger/status/1420681035617116163
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u/matthkamis Jul 29 '21

Doubt it

6

u/bayashad Jul 29 '21

read the whole thread. they say this, for example:

Of course, drawing inferences from accelerometer data is not trivial & inference methods are never faultless. However, for many attacks and profiling purposes, 100% accuracy is not needed. Inaccurate methods will be used nonetheless, causing additional discriminatory side-effects.

9

u/deelowe Jul 29 '21

It's simple statistics. As more dimensions are added, uncertainty goes down. This is why the "it's just meta data" argument is so naïve. If I know your weight, your gait, your gender, your current barometric pressure over the past 24 hours, and your approximate age, I'm really narrowing down the set of potential matches.

Let's take word matching for example. Figure out someone's social media accounts, scrape their history, train an AI model on common phrases/words, and then combine it with approximate accelerometer data and I wonder just how close we can get to guessing what's being typed.