July 8, 2024, 2:25 pm | Read time: 3 minutes
Conspiracy theories and misinformation frequently circulate on social media, often reaching many people. One relatively widespread claim is that the iPhone secretly takes “infrared photos.” TECHBOOK investigates the validity of this claim.
A woman shared a video on the social media platform TikTok, claiming to show how the iPhone takes a photo with infrared light every five seconds. The video features an infrared camera pointed at an iPhone with Face ID. The camera shows that a light indeed flashes on the iPhone every five seconds—even though the device is unlocked and only the home screen is visible.
No, the iPhone does not take secret photos
The reason for this is not that the device is secretly taking pictures. The iPhone uses this to check whether users are looking at the screen. The scanning is part of the “attention-sensitive features,” which allow the iPhone to adjust its behavior in certain contexts.
To explain how the scanning works, we need to delve into some details. The iPhone’s notch houses a range of sensors primarily used for unlocking with Face ID. However, they also have other functions, such as scanning for a face looking at the screen. At the Apple event in September 2017, the company demonstrated how these sensors work together. For this article, it’s only relevant how the face detection works.
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The sophisticated sensor system in the iPhone
The proximity sensor detects when something appears in front of the iPhone. The dot projector projects tens of thousands of tiny dots forward to recognize the shape of the face. What appears as blinking in the video is the infrared flood illuminator. This supports the dot projector in a dark environment with an additional infrared light beam. The infrared camera captures the reflected light and can thus determine whether a face is indeed looking at the iPhone screen.
Since infrared light is outside the visible spectrum for the human eye, it goes unnoticed in everyday use. However, even a regular smartphone camera can make the light visible.
Attention-sensitive features can be disabled in settings
As we’ve shown, there’s no truth to the rumor that the iPhone secretly takes a photo every five seconds. If you’re still unsure, you can disable the infrared scanning in the settings at any time. Simply go to Settings>Face ID & Passcode and enter your passcode. Disable the options Attention Aware Features and Attention-Sensitive Features. However, be aware that this removes an additional security layer of Face ID, as the system will no longer check if you’re looking at the iPhone when unlocking it.