Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.
Until people complain that Apple is being anti-competitive by not making vision tracking open, or allowing third-party eye-tracking controls, etc. etc.
System one is, but advertisers could always roll their own and see if they can get away with "you can only view this content if you give us permission to use your camera".
At least on iOS, I can't imagine that happening - apps are not allowed to demand you grant permissions unrelated to the actual functionality. From App Review Guidelines (5.1.1) Data Collection and Storage, (ii) Access:
> Apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access. For example, apps that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos.
Lots of iOS apps today really want to mine your address book, and constantly spam you with dialogs to enable it, but they don't go as far as disabling other features until you grant them access, because they'd get rejected once someone noticed.
Fortunately apps in the EU don’t have to pass though Apple’s anticompetitive review process, so developers are free to ignore that rule if they simply distribute the app via an alternative store.
Unfortunately, poor Americans cannot taste the freedom that Europeans have to be abused by developers.
It's not that hard to come with ways to circumvent system restrictions, after all, advertisers are a fierce adversary and have shown many clever ways of invading users privacy in web browsers and mobile apps. In the case of eye tracking I could see a situation where the system perhaps feeds the "malicious" app in question with a hint of which widget is being currently gazed by the user. You could then just build a giant grid of invisible widgets covering the whole app window and use that to reconstruct the all the eye tracking happening inside your app.
This is not about technical restrictions and finding weird legal loopholes, Apple's guidelines don't work that way. It's the spirit that matters, not the letter.
If you look at the current things the EU has forced them to open up (app distribution and NFC payments), both of them are things that Apple was already actively monetizing.
To compare this to a non-monetized accessibility feature is a bit disingenuous.
The whole notion of ‘fairness’ is that gatekeepers should allow others to compete on even footing. That can be fulfilled by granting EITHER everybody OR nobody access to the market (but not: only yourself).
Fifteen million merits is maybe the least about the future of any Black Mirror episode. It reads best as entirely a comment on the society we already have.
A big clue is that the world in it doesn’t make a ton of internal sense and the episode makes absolutely no effort to smooth that over. The questions it raises and leaves open without even attempting an answer are on purpose. You’re supposed to go “god, bicycling to make little pellets? Just to buy useless trash? God, why? It’s so pointless,” or, “they truly look down on and are mean to the people who get demoted, even though they’re basically guaranteed to end up that way someday, when their health or good fortune run out? Just cruelty for no reason that’s highly likely to hit them some day, too? That’s insane!”
… because actually it’s about now (or, the year it came out) and the point is to get you to connect the dots and realize we’re doing the same crap and just don’t notice. It’s only “sci fi” as some sleight of hand to give you an alien’s eye view of our own actual society as a way to prompt reflection. The core story of the corruption of a “revolutionary” to serve the purposes of the system is some bog-standard media studies stuff pertaining to today, not sci fi. The reveal that they could just fucking stop all this and go outside, it’s not some alien world or a post apocalypse after all is yet another thing that’s supposed to make you go “what’s wrong with them? Oh. Right. It’s us.”[1]
Long winded way to say: we can’t “end up” at Fifteen Million Merits future-world, because it’s just our own world we’re already in.
[1] Some read the final scene as depicting yet another viewscreen, but this is such a wildly weaker reading as far as the how effective the scene is that I can’t believe it’s intended that way.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.