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Comment by wallacoloo | Hacker News Reader

This is a fantastic idea, but do web pages really not require special permissions to access gyroscope data?

On Android (like, 4.2 or something) with Firefox, the page and the CSV just displays `null` for alpha, beta and gamma. And the calculated rate is 9.1 samples per second, which seems way too low to extract any speech details even if the data were valid.

This is distinct from the "No device motion data" message presented on my desktop though. So it seems to me that the page sees that a gyroscope is present, and requests data from it, but Firefox is just feeding it null values?

I haven't tried the apk yet.

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Re. web pages, the feature is called DeviceOrientation Event and no, the spec doesn't require user permission: https://www.w3.org/TR/orientation-event/

Tried it on Mobile Safari (iOS 9.2) - works. Pretty crazy, there was no need to give permissions.

Chrome on Android shows the proper data - with no special permissions or warnings. It updates at ~57 samples/s.

If you check the paper the authors indeed mention some rate limitations using Chrome. However Firefox provides samples at 200 Hz. Also, every application can access those measurements without any permissions.

As the authors note in the full paper, even a sample rate of 200 Hz only results in capturing audio information for frequencies up to 100 Hz.

If one applies a 100 Hz filter to some samples of human speech (even low-pitched male voices, as the authors of the paper suggest), the result is (unsurprisingly) the sort of "womp womp" that one might expect to hear from a car with giant subwoofers, not anything containing recognizable words.

The authors of the paper admit that they were unable to recover the content of speech, but focused on identifying the speaker. That's a long way from capturing credit card numbers (which is what their promo video implies).

Basically, I'll believe it when I see it. The approach is really interesting, though, and I think could be useful for other things.

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