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Facebook iOS app has camera active during use
- BoorishBears 7y agoI have a strong feeling this is a hamfisted attempt to make stories or some other camera related feature more seamless. But FB has kind of burned any goodwill anyone had for them, so I can't exactly be sympathetic if that's the case and they're getting skewered but didn't do anything nefarious.
- AlexandrB 7y ago> I have a strong feeling this is a hamfisted attempt to make stories or some other camera related feature more seamless. Even assuming innocent intentions, I wonder if image data would still end up in crash dumps or app analytics.
- judge2020 7y agoI find it a little hard to believe tapping on a profile picture "accidentally" opens the camera shutter, and behind the main UI nonetheless. Maybe this is an edge case for their UI tests and human QA didn't catch it?
- BoorishBears 7y agoIt wouldn't be an accident, it'd be a (messy) workaround for camera startup time
- easytiger 7y agoHave a one plus 7 pro with a pop up camera. There are a number of websites that seems to invoke the camera. Becomes more viscerally disturbing when it just pops up out of nowhere.
- aembleton 7y agoI found this only happened in Firefox. No other app caused it, so I disabled the camera permission for Firefox and it's stopped doing it. Definitely disturbing having it pop out and you know something is trying to read it.
- kccqzy 7y agoIndeed. If you look closely, there's a gear icon right on top of the camera feed. Facebook can plausibly say that they wanted to make the "stories" feature more seamless but an engineer screwed up. And we'd never really know whether an engineer accidentally screwed up or higher management planned this purposefully to have a junior engineer screw up. EDIT: clarified wording.
- netsharc 7y agoA while ago there was brouhaha that Snapchat did this as well, of course the (technically valid) reason is having the camera running is faster than needing to launch it on-demand as the user swipes to the camera view
- fingerlocks 7y agoSome responses to that tweet point out that this is a UI bug when using the “Add Story” feature, as certain UI elements can still be seen on the camera feed. Looks like a Hanlon’s Razor situation.
- fulafel 7y agoHanlon's razor is conditional to having a low level of paranoia towards the actor. If your perceived prior probability (in bayesian terms) of villainy is high, it doesn't apply.
- wanderer2323 7y agoWhy not apply Nolnah's Razor? In the absense of evidence to the contrary assume that outcome matches intent.
- chance_state 7y agoI can't wait for the post in the Facebook Newsroom: "For the last two years, we have been accidentally using your facial reactions when scrolling past sponsored content in order to more closely tailor your Facebook experience to you. We've very, very sorry, and we'll disable this feature in a coming update. As always, your trust and safety are our number one concern."
- djsumdog 7y agoIs it possible to install custom CAs on a jailbroken iOS device and use a man-in-the-middle proxy? The difference between honest mistake and sinister intent should be clear if FB is transmitting any of that audio or video data while it has access to the camera without you knowing.
- arkadiyt 7y agoYou'd also have to remove or bypass their certificate pinning
- dev_dull 7y agoThis can be done easily and without jail breaking on any iPhone with tools such as Charles proxy (provided they don’t do certificate pinning). They work by having you generate, install, and trust a profile which includes a root CA.
- wtmt 7y agoSeeing the Chromium blog post that said it’s going to put a “slow badge” on some sites based on speed and responsiveness measurements, I’d like to see Apple put an “usually untrusted” or “deeply untrusted” badge that’s shown every time the Facebook, FB Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and related apps from that company are opened on Apple made devices. There needs to be a lot more mass shaming on Facebook the company and it’s endless loop of “oops, it was a bug, we’re sorry” abominable practices.
- scarface74 7y agoIn this case it’s simple. When Facebook asks to have access to either your camera, microphone, or photos library, just say no. You can still use the photo picker to upload pictures without giving FB access to your library.
- wtmt 7y agoYes, I know that, but most users wouldn’t know or wouldn’t follow that because it’s inconvenient. But I don’t agree with this solution for this particular case. It is a good practice in general. In this instance, nobody would expect that an app that you gave camera or microphone access to would be recording video or audio without you explicitly initiating such a recording. Imagine if WhatsApp was found to be recording audio all the time while you were reading chats or responding to chats in text just because you gave the microphone permission to it since you use it occasionally to send voice messages to certain people. Would that be acceptable, bug or otherwise? Why should one’s reaction be any different for the Facebook (or any other) app? What’s happening here is a serious violation of trust and expectations.
- rapnie 7y agoAre WA voice and vid calls also e2e encrypted, or only the text msgs you send?
- blunte 7y agoOf course there is a workaround. But why should we give FB any of our attention, knowing that they likely will and previously have intentionally violated our privacy and trust for their financial benefit?
- ProfessorLayton 7y agoFB definitely does not deserve the benefit of doubt anymore regarding privacy issues. That being said, this feature soon to be called a bug, feels like one of those things being done in the name of performance. I do not agree with this solution, however, the startup time for the camera on older iOS devices can be frustratingly slow. My 6S now on iOS 13 can take several seconds for the camera to turn on. This is most evident when trying to capture something in the moment on Snapchat. The stock camera app takes long enough that I often miss key moments (I plan to upgrade soon, but have not yet committed to losing my headphone jack). I’m not at all excusing this, but I can see why they’d try this if they want their users to post more original content
- baroffoos 7y agoIts incredible how badly apple slows down phones via updates. There is no way it would have been that slow at release. I recently watched a video of someone using the original iphone and everything was super snappy. The camera took hardly any time to open.
- colejohnson66 7y agoIt’s almost like software that gets more complex over time is slower on older devices...
- baroffoos 7y agoUpdates should not degrade the usability of a device. If a device is too slow to run new features then they should be disabled by default. Apple has an obvious incentive to make people disatisfied with their older devices and want to buy the new one so it is fast again.
- colejohnson66 7y agoIf they disable the feature, then they’re accused of planned obsolescence too. They can’t win against people like you.
- knzhou 7y agoEvery week or so there's a new theory that some tech company is constantly using your phone's microphone or camera and siphoning all the data back to HQ. Every time the reason is the same: incompetence. Something like this can result from a single misplaced line of code. On the other hand, no tech company on Earth wants to have the job of processing a billion extra audio or video feeds. This would require enormous resources, on the scale of whole engineering departments, for questionable gain. And it couldn't be secret, because the point of gathering all that data is to target ads, so advertisers would have to know about it. The notion that this is intentional is about as credible as the average conspiracy theory. (Of course, selective monitoring by the government is perfectly possible -- but we already knew that, and it would be a lot more subtle than this.)
- loteck 7y agoDid we learn nothing from the NSA? The big players long ago learned: you won't ever have the option to process something you never collected in the first place. "Collect it all." Process it later.
- knzhou 7y agoDo some order of magnitude calculations. There isn't enough storage space to reasonably collect everybody's video feed continually. It would require a significant chunk of literally all bandwidth that exists. If the NSA were actively monitoring your phone's camera feed, it wouldn't only work when Facebook is open, and it wouldn't literally say it was doing so on the screen, like it is here. What is actually happening just doesn't look like genuine surveillance. As I said, it looks like a mistake.
- asjw 7y agoIf you have the metadata regarding phone usage or engagement you know when it's the best moment If you can process the images on the phone for cheap (modern phones can do that) you can send only the relevant metadata
- pembrook 7y ago
- Apocryphon 7y agoFacebook has somewhere in the ballpark of 800 iOS developers. And fewer than eight apps.
- dvhh 7y agoDo someone have a solid reproducer ? https://reclaimthenet.org/iphone-facebook-camera-access-bug/ https://reclaimthenet.org/iphone-facebook-camera-access-bug/ So far it seems to only affect iOS 13.2. for iphone 8 or older devices
- why-oh-why 7y agoIf you swipe right on the feed you’ll open the camera. I’m gonna guess this is a bug related to that.
- greggman2 7y agoI really wish the App store rules made it so non camera apps were not allowed to access the camera and had to ask the OS to present the OS camera. Same for access to the photos. I wish an app asked the OS for photos and an OS level UI let the user choose the pictures and only those pictures are provided to the app. As it is any app that asks for camera access gets too much access and any app that asks for photo access gets access to all photos. neither of those are in line with Apple's privacy stance
- SN76477 7y agoFB are just no longer trusted by me.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dwd 7y agoLife imitating art... --------------------- If you knew the trouble I had getting an AI to read and duplicate facial expressions. You know how I cracked it? I don't know how you did any of this. Every cell phone, just about, has a microphone, camera and a means to transmit data. So I turned on every microphone and camera across the entire fucking planet and I redirected the data through Blue Book. Boom! Limitless resource of vocal and facial interaction. You hacked the world's cell phones? Yeah. And all the manufacturers knew I was doing it, too. But they couldn't accuse me without admitting they were doing it themselves. - Ex Machina (2014)
- jangid 7y agoAnyway it was consuming too much of battery (phone's as well as mine). So I switched to FF browser on iOS. Then after some months I stopped going to FB. Now I have lots of productive hours.
- rollulus 7y agoiOS has this feature that shows per app a coarse history of its access to location info; an similar overview for camera access would be useful too.
- tga 7y agoI would love to have a (software) indicator that the camera/microphone are being accessed, similar to the location services icon. I think that would already be enough for users to start asking questions and keep abusive use in check.
- jmkni 7y agoCan iOS apps use the camera without the user seeing the banner at the top? I was under the impression that was baked into the OS?
- oflannabhra 7y agoInstagram does screen recordings when a user is in certain portions of the app. If you swipe to the right and then back again, you will see a small red indicator in the status bar finish its animation. You can also see this if you return to the home screen quickly. I removed camera and microphone privileges from the app when I saw this, which means I can’t create Stories anymore.
- kahlonel 7y agoI don’t know why would anyone install the FB app on their iPhone. The mobile version is sufficiently good, given the fact that their app doesn’t even support messaging.
- an2911k 7y agoI see all the comments and everyone is blaming Facebook. What about Apple? Why did Apple let such an app through unless Apple was fine with it...
- colejohnson66 7y agoBecause they didn’t know about it? It’s not a conspiracy.
- Phillips126 7y agoAnd if the claim is true and provable, Facebook ($55 billion revenue 2018) will probably be fined $1-4 million which will sure "teach them a lesson" to never be bad again! Google, Facebook, and others must just have a budget set aside for these issues - costs of doing business I guess as they profit more than they are fined.