The beta for iOS 12.2 contains a change to mobile Safari that could have implications for the advertising and marketing worlds, as well as for Web-based augmented or virtual reality more generally.
In the beta, a toggle labeled “Motion & Orientation Access” exists in the Safari privacy settings panel. This toggle determines whether sites visited in the mobile Safari browser will be able to access the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad’s gyroscope or accelerometer. This setting currently defaults to “off,” which means users would have to have the foresight to navigate to the Settings app and enable it before being able to use AR experiences from the Web.
Two Apple employees on Twitter elaborated on the change. Apple software engineer Ricky Mondello wrote in a tweet thread recounting the various notes in the Safari 12.1 release for iOS:
Safari 12.1 (iOS): “Added Motion & Orientation settings on iOS to enable the DeviceMotionEvent and DeviceOrientationEvent events.”
This is disabled by default.
The wording in quotes from his tweet can be found in the official release notes on Apple’s website. And John Wilander, a WebKit security and privacy engineer at Apple, wrote in response to a tweet noting the change:
We asked for the ability to gate the feature with a user permission, for privacy reasons. Apparently the answer was no. That leaves no option but to turn it off by default for browsers that care about this kind of privacy.
However, when a Digiday reporter reached out to Wilander on Twitter for confirmation and clarification, he deferred to Apple PR, which has not yet provided a statement.