Facebook iOS app has camera active during use

https://twitter.com/JoshuaMaddux/status/1193434937824702464

by robbya • 7 years ago

216 83 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

I 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?

BoorishBears2• 7 years ago

It wouldn't be an accident, it'd be a (messy) workaround for camera startup time

easytiger• 7 years ago

Have 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.

kccqzy• 7 years ago

Indeed. 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• 7 years ago

A 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• 7 years ago

Some 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• 7 years ago

Hanlon'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• 7 years ago

Why not apply Nolnah's Razor?

In the absense of evidence to the contrary assume that outcome matches intent.

chance_state• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

Is 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• 7 years ago

You'd also have to remove or bypass their certificate pinning

dev_dull• 7 years ago

This 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.

wtmt2• 7 years ago

Seeing 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.

scarface743• 7 years ago

In 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.

wtmt2• 7 years ago

Yes, 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.

blunte• 7 years ago

Of 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?

greggman22• 7 years ago

Thanks to your comment I spent a few moments figuring out how to do that. It's not perfect but it's a huge improvement. I've had camera access off but photo access on. I turned it off and then used photos to select pics and then pick share and choose the app. For FB messenger it starts a new thread which works great. If you choose a single user it will add to that thread. For the main FB app it starts a new post. I'm not sure there is a way to add photos to comments or events or albums without photo access.

ProfessorLayton2• 7 years ago

FB 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

baroffoos5• 7 years ago

Its 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.

colejohnson663• 7 years ago

It’s almost like software that gets more complex over time is slower on older devices...

gruez• 7 years ago

My 6S now on iOS 13 can take several seconds for the camera to turn on.

I can't seem to replicate this (6s, iOS 13.2). Opening the stock camera app from homescreen, I can see an image in less than 1s.

hysan• 7 years ago

My hunch is that parent has Peak Performance Capability battery throttling turned on. When my 6S crashes and turns that protective feature on, I too noticed how slow everything gets. But I disable that because I'd rather have the occasional crash than suffer the extreme slowdown during the 99+% of the time that I'm using my phone without problem.

If this is Facebook's solution to that type of slowness though, that's not a great solution. I feel like having both the app and camera on will drive up CPU usage making it might more likely that a power spike happens which will cause your phone to shutdown. Not a great tradeoff in my opinion for older phones.

mukundmr• 7 years ago

How is your battery doing? Try changing it to make sure that there is nothing throttling performance. iOS 13 is snappier on the 6S. They did a lot of work on performance improvements.

CojocAdrian• 7 years ago

All time when i use Facebook i think that someone follow me by web camera. My opinion is that we allow too much that our confidential infos are public by allow all this privacy terms.

cmurf3• 7 years ago

Whatsapp refuses to function if you don't give it permission to read your contacts. I want to manually input the numbers I want to message via Whatsapp, but that isn't an option. Whatsapp wants to collect my entire contacts. My refusal to grant such permission means I can't use the app, which means there's no point keeping it around.

theshrike79• 7 years ago

On iOS?

AFAIK that's not allowed for iOS software, all programs must work even if the permissions are denied or redacted.

74ls00• 7 years ago

Mine works fine without contacts. Maybe try reinstalling?

beagle32• 7 years ago

Works for me. But I can’t keep hundreds of numbers in my head anymore (though I did in my teens), and I hate constantly switching to my contacts - not to mention search by phone number to see who just WhatsApped me just doesn’t work well.

My solution is that I bought a $80-new Android phone (2nd hand would be $20 or less) which I keep at home on WiFi, and WhatsApp web from my iPhone to it. Works perfectly, except notifications, which is somewhat of a beature.

Small price to pay for keeping my main phone Facebook free.

pfranz• 7 years ago

I installed Whatsapp for the very first time last week. I feel like there's additional friction and nagging if you don't give it access to your contacts, but you can definitely open it and send/receive messages.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

I use WhatsApp without the contacts permission enabled (on Android, FWIW) and it works just fine.

pvinis• 7 years ago

This is true. Many apps, including one I worked on, start the camera a bit earlier, with no feedback, just so it's ready to go when you use it. In my case it was starting the camera on the screen right before going to record, very purposefully. In fb's case I guess the home screen is that screen, so it's not great, but it is the only choice if you want fast camera access.

So this is not necessarily a bad thing. Whether they use the feed for anything else is not something we can know I guess, but my bet is that they don't actually do anything sneaky with it besides trying to give the users a faster camera experience.

xg15• 7 years ago

This is true. Many apps, including one I worked on, start the camera a bit earlier, with no feedback, just so it's ready to go when you use it.

Interesting. This sounds like a good use-case for an OS API: The OS could either provide some API to "warm up" the camera or allow apps to declare in the manifest that they'll likely need the camera soon after launch - then the OS could do the preloading and do it in a privacy-preserving manner. (And also give the user a central option to disable it)

ghego12• 7 years ago

If you care about the camera and don't want to lose the jack, go for a Pixel 3a, best value for money. Plus you get a very lasting battery.

aembleton3• 7 years ago

Then they will loose the iOS eco system. All of the apps that they've bought and will have to relearn a new OS.

knzhou2• 7 years ago

Every 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• 7 years ago

Did 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.

knzhou2• 7 years ago

Do 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.

pembrook• 7 years ago

I love hacker news but this is one trigger topic where the community goes a little crazy.

Your comment is entirely rational and yet it’s been downvoted to the bottom. Privacy is an extremely important issue, but it’s 100% clear in this case that Facebook is not doing anything nefarious here.

I’ve got a buddy in growth marketing who tells me any headline inciting privacy hysteria is a super easy way to game the front page here.

jesterson• 7 years ago

Community goes crazy because community values it's privacy, while big corporations are exploiting it for obvious reasons.

You are saying FB is not doing anything nefarious here like Cambridge Analytica never existed. And it's only one thing we know - how many leakages - or shall we call it deliberate exploitation of personal information - we were not aware of?

While corporations will continue dealing with private data as they please without letting us know, those cases will gain attention.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

"Nothing to see here, my buddy who abuses peoples' personal data for a living says it's perfectly fine"

wizzwizz4• 7 years ago

They could easily be gathering facial expression data, processed on the phone, in order to better assess people's reactions to what they're being shown, in order to better manipulate them for money.

Just because it's possible doesn't mean they are doing it – this instance is probably just a bug. Doesn't explain why Instagram turns on the laptop camera indicator light on Windows 10 when the app isn't even (supposed to be) running, and stuff like that, though.

danillonunes2• 7 years ago

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.

Not necessarily. They don’t need to tell the advertisers “target people who are talking about X on their phone’s microphones”, they can just tell “target people who is interested in X”, and they will still be profiting because advertisers will figure whatever their black box algorithm for targeting is doing, it’s doing better than the competition.

Apocryphon• 7 years ago

Facebook has somewhere in the ballpark of 800 iOS developers. And fewer than eight apps.

dvhh• 7 years ago

Do someone have a solid reproducer ?

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• 7 years ago

If you swipe right on the feed you’ll open the camera. I’m gonna guess this is a bug related to that.

greggman22• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

FB are just no longer trusted by me.

dwd• 7 years ago

Life 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• 7 years ago

Anyway 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• 7 years ago

iOS 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• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

Can 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• 7 years ago

Instagram 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• 7 years ago

I 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• 7 years ago

I 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...

colejohnson663• 7 years ago

Because they didn’t know about it? It’s not a conspiracy.

Phillips126• 7 years ago

And 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.

Facebook iOS app has camera active during use

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