Apple Inc.

Jessica Aranda

Patrick L Coffman

Stephen J Rhee

Julien F Freudiger

Brandon J Van Ryswyk

Nicole R Ryan

Guy Leslie Tribble

Richard L Hagy

Gavin B Thomson

Adam C Swift

Matthew J Dickoff

Eric Lance Wilson

Ronald Keryuan Huang

Christopher Daryl Soli

Behkish J Manzari

Matthew Elliot Shepherd

Deepak R Iyer

Erik C Neuenschwander

Karan Misra

Krishna M Behara

Christopher K Thomas

Matthew H Gamble

Brian D Pietsch

James R Montgomerie

Matthew B Ball

Adam M Driscoll

Christian Schroeder

Nahir A Khan

Cindy M Barrett

Andrey Pokrovskiy

Ron Huang

Katherine B Skinner

Christopher C Foster

John Wilander

Glen S Low

Patrick W Demasco

Charles D Deets

Shuli Zhou

Ansh Shukla

Alexander S Haas

Stefan Stuerke

Kevin M Miller

Anant Jain

Kyle Martin Sluder

Zeheng Chen

Siraj T Abidi

Maria Ryen

Ron Haung

Matthew Hansen Gamble

Embodiments described herein provide a software-based privacy indicator for a camera and microphone that focuses not purely on hardware status (e.g., on or off), but on whether potentially private data is flowing to the system or an application. If based purely on hardware status, the indicator for an electronic device may be shown in scenarios where no data actually flows to the system or applications. The privacy indicator will be enabled if any camera or microphone data is relayed to the operating system or an application that is executed via the operating system. When the device uses the microphone and camera to capture environmental metadata about the surroundings of the device without providing any audio samples, images, or video frames to the system or an application, the privacy indicator will not be enabled.

Software initiated camera and microphone indicator

Described herein are techniques to enable limited access to a photos library by enabling application specific virtual photo libraries. When an application requests access to the photos library, the user can select an option to enable or configure a virtual photos library, and then select specific assets (e.g., photos, videos) within the photos library to be selected for inclusion into an application specific virtual photos library.

Virtual library

An access control system is provided to prevent the surreptitious granting of access to privacy related functionality on an electronic device. Software-based events to grant access to device functionality can be validated by confirming that the software event corresponds with a hardware input event. This validation prevents the spoofing of a user interface input that may be used to fraudulently grant access to specific functionality.

Authenticated interface element interactions

A location control subsystem is provided that allows a user of an electronic device to define the granularity used to provide location coarseness. A user can define a coarse location granularity for an application. When a coarse device location is reported to an application, the location can be provided with at least a minimum degree of variable specificity based on the selected location coarseness. When an application is granted a coarse location, the application is to interpret the provided location indicating that the user may be anywhere within a geographic region of variable specificity, as opposed to being close to a center point with a horizontal accuracy based on the precision of the location fix, as when a fine granularity location is provided. In addition to reducing the spatial resolution of the location that is reported to the application, the temporal resolution may also be reduced.

User selectable location granularity

Virtual photos library

Private and secure autocomplete suggestions are enabled based on a user contacts database, even when an application has not been granted access to the user contacts database. A keyboard process can receive and display suggestions based on input provided via the keyboard. The suggestions are generated based on a contacts database of a user. The suggestions are generated without exposing the contacts database to the application. Suggestions are then displayed to the user without exposing the suggestions to the application. Once a suggestion is selected by a user, the selected suggestion is provided to the application for insertion into a text field.

Contacts autocomplete keyboard

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Jessica Aranda