Does your iPhone take a photo of you every five seconds? No, that's not true: The reason the infrared camera picks up a flash every five seconds is because of iPhone's facial recognition feature. It uses a TrueDepth camera system that accurately maps the geometry of your face. TrueDepth projects and analyzes your face with over 30,000 invisible dots and captures it through the infrared image of your face. The infrared image is converted to a mathematical representation and enrolled in your smartphone as facial data. The flashing is because of a feature called Attention Aware. The feature can be turned off.
The claim reappeared as a video (archived here) on TikTok where it was published by @konspiratorboldy on June 7, 2023 under the title translated by Lead Stories staff as "Big Brother watches your every step." It opened:
Your smartphone or iPhone takes a photo of you every 5 seconds through the camera. Did you know that?
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Jul 21 18:45:58 2023 UTC)
The original video was posted by Brie Thomason on May 8, 2021. The iPhone is performing an action every few seconds, as shown in the video. However, this is related to a feature Apple calls Attention Aware. Attention Aware is used by an iPhone to see if the user is actually looking at the device and is used to ensure the iPhone's display doesn't turn off or go dim while the user is still looking at the screen. The flashes seen in the video do not represent the iPhone taking photos, but scanning for the user's face. The feature is not available on all iPhone models and can be turned off in the FaceID & Passcode menu.
