Auto backlight management?

[Martin Dengler]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:05:10AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
> On 25.04.2008, at 10:46, Martin Dengler wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 12:07:12AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
> >>It's clear to me that it would be quite useful to have a bright
> >>backlight AND black & white mode for reading a book at night, for
> >>instance, and this isn't possible in the current UI.
> >
> >The camera could be checked once when the device went into/out of
> >ebook mode and the backlight changed appropriately.
>
> Malicious software also could snap a picture of the user at that
> moment. This is the privacy issue that Ivan mentioned, and I agree,
> we cannot use a camera image for this.

Well sure...but it seems to raise slightly different concerns:
activating the camera when switching to/from ebook mode would be 1)
infrequent; and 2) in response to user action.  That seems quite
different from activating the camera frequently enough to set the
backlight during normal, interactive use, and not in response to any
specific user action.

For my personal use case, if someone manages to get me to install an
activity that gets an up-nose picture of me without my knowledge, only
when the back of the screen has hit/left the keyboard top, but my
backlight goes off/on if it's dark/light, that'd still work for me.
I'll send the patch around if I get to it without any expectation
it'll get merged.

> What I suggested before, but which was not practicable, would be
> some "passive" readout-hardware in the camera that only reports a
> single brightness value. But I was told the current design would
> require to power the camera on for that. And in a new hardware
> design it may be cheaper and better to add a photo sensor than this.

The activities/projects made possible with a light sensor / the
information you describe are very cool.

> - Bert -

Martin
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