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Comment by ChrisLTD | Hacker News Reader

> Whether this will be the solution is unclear; the privacy/creepiness angle is still real with an outwards-facing camera.

I don't think you're wrong, but it's funny that we aren't as concerned about everyone walking around with outwards-facing phone cameras.

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Or microphones being present absolutely everywhere.

I myself never felt like taping my camera, I feel like if someone pwned my system I would be much more worried about the leaked audio.

It's funny, I see people cover up the webcam on their laptops all the time, but not their phones. They forget that there's a camera on both sides of the phone.

Webcams in laptops are shitty cameras, and for most people, they're useless anyway (even in post-pandemic era, hardly anyone does conference calls, video or otherwise). Meanwhile, "selfie camera" is like literally the main purpose of the phone for a large chunk of the population.

tbf those are usually in a pocker or down facing, with filming being an explicit and purposeful action

Plenty of people are walking around, or sitting in a public place with their phone cameras facing out to the world.

I think what the parent comment was saying is that when being held in a normal manner, the phone is facing about 45 degrees below the horizon, so it can't see much except people's legs. To film people's faces and such, you'd have to tilt the phone up much higher than you would if you were just writing a text message / email or browsing the web. If you try writing a text on a phone that's angled up to the horizon like that, it's harder to type and harder to read the screen.

The wide angle lens on my iPhone can capture a pretty good portion of my current room even with my phone angled 45 degrees down.

True. I suppose the social conventions around overt vs covert use of smartphone cameras evolved before wide-angle cameras on phones became common, since wide-angle cameras on phones are a pretty new thing.

And especially since we can now make cameras small enough that you'd never know they were there. Even OVM6948 is commercially available, the size of a "grain of sand".

I've always said that privacy is an illusion, the usual example I give is: "You're lying in bed with the curtains drawn, you see a shadow fall across the curtains that looks like a person standing outside. Do you, or do you not have privacy?"

If the shadow turns out to be a person peeking through the curtains, then you don't. If the shadow turns out to be primal brain + tree shadow then you do. Schrodinger style.

Privacy is probably best described (as it sometimes is) as a "sense" of privacy I guess.

Well said.

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