Woman claims ‘iPhone takes photo of you every 5 seconds’ in wild conspiracy theory

A conspiracy theorist has shared a wild claim that Apple iPhones have been “secretly” taking photos of their users’ faces every five seconds.

In a viral TikTok video, user @itsconspiracyseriously confesses she “doesn’t know if it’s true” but says she has seen a video where infrared captures the iPhone flashing.

She then does a “stitch” with the original clip by @briethomasons, which shows a woman using her digital camera’s infrared technology to capture the iPhone flashing while a man holds it close to his face.

The video went viral and racked up more than 1.7 million views but has since been debunked, as the TikToker explains in a follow-up.

It turns out the phone is actually scanning to see if you are looking directly at the screen and it only occurs on iPhones that have the Face ID feature, Mirror reports.

The Attention-Aware feature means that the phone will check whether you’re paying attention to the screen, before dimming the display, lowering the volume of some alerts, or expanding a notification.

One person commented: “The phone is not taking pictures, it’s only seeing if you are looking at the phone so it won’t lock while you are looking at it. You can deactivate that.”

Others claimed to have seen the flashes on their baby monitor and been confused as to what they were.

If you’re not keen on the idea of your phone constantly scanning your face, you can disable the feature in settings.

You simply go to Face ID & Passcode, enter your passcode and then scroll down to attention.

Here you have two options you can deactivate: Require Attention for Face ID and Attention-Aware Features.

The first feature, Require Attention, says: “TrueDepth camera will provide an additional level of security by verifying that you are looking at iPhone before unlocking.

“Some sunglasses may block attention detection.”

The second, Attention-Aware, reads: “iPhone will check for attention before dimming the display, expanding a notification when locked or lowering the volume of some alerts.”