11-06-2020, 04:50 AM
(11-05-2020, 06:21 PM)11Eleven Wrote: Let us buy a model without the heart-rate monitor, or be able to switch it off and have a bit more control over our privacy, if that's still even a thing.
The point of PineTime is that the hardware is well documented and the software is user modifiable so you should already be able to do all of these things.
Depending on your degree of concern about the sensor you can:
1. Buy a dev kit, physically unplug or remove the sensor and glue the back on yourself
2. Pick one (or more) of the PineTime operating systems and disable or rip out the code that runs the sensor. For example if you adopted wasp-os then disabling is a one line change (and ripping it out isn't that much harder)
3. Review the existing code to run the heart rate sensor and decide if it already meets your privacy concerns. Again using wasp-os as an example the heart rate monitor is only ever active when the heart application is running (e.g. when you can see the graph of your heart activity on the screen). All the heart rate monitoring code is written in python so you don't need lots of embedded C experience to understand it. This is the code that disables the sensor when you switch to another screen: https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-...py#L33-L35 .