Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos

https://www.zdnet.com/article/meta-might-be-secretly-scanning-your-phones-camera-roll-how-to-check-and-turn-it-off/

by mdhb • 11 months ago

535 246 11 months ago

cj• 11 months ago

This should be a non-issue if you use Apple’s privacy settings to limit Facebook to only have access to the photos you want to use.

I’d highly recommend never granting any app full access to your photos.

loumf• 11 months ago

You should do this for apps even if you trust them.

One issue with permissions is that they apply to the entire app, including any third-party dependencies. Lots of apps use libraries given to them by advertising services -- they notoriously exploit permissions given to the app.

lloydatkinson• 11 months ago

WhatsApp used to (still might) default to saving all photos from any chat to your phone. This led to some very surprising and unwanted photos being saved to my iPhone gallery. What a stupid idea.

abcd_f• 11 months ago

That's on newer iOS versions and, by extension, on newer Apple devices only though.

rimunroe• 11 months ago

Photo library permissions have been around since iOS 14. As long as you have an iPhone made in the last ten years you should be able to use it.

bigDinosaur• 11 months ago

Apparently this functionality was released in iOS 14, which was supported by the iPhone 6S, released in 2015, so any phone in the past 10 years should have support for it. That seems reasonable enough.

gessha• 11 months ago

Apple should improve the UI of this photo selection because it’s very cumbersome to scroll and select the same photos twice.

Clent• 11 months ago

Agreed. The feature set is in desperate need of the search option both on approved photos and when attempting to approve additional photos. Very often I have to go into the photos app, find the photo, make a mental record of approximately where it is in history and scroll scroll scroll. Obnoxious and cumbersome.

subarctic• 11 months ago

I think they have because with chatgpt you click the photo icon and it uses the system photo picker to pick a photo. I guess Meta deliberately isn't implementing that

afarah1• 11 months ago

Android also has limited photos access nowadays.

jcomis• 11 months ago

maybe they changed it, but last time I checked I could not upload on instagram on Android with limited access. It required full access, plus camera/microphone in order to post.

const_cast3• 11 months ago

The problem is people have to actually do this, and it's cumbersome.

The solution is just straight up banning apps from the app store which request full photos permissions but only need a picker.

Whatsapp only needs a picker, it's not Google photos. Just make that part of the developer terms and start banning low hanging fruit and the apps will confirm in no time.

brk• 11 months ago

I've removed all Meta apps other than Whatsapp (and I don't love that). I haven't had the Facebook app on my phone in well over a decade. Had Instagram for a while, I was casually active on it, but Meta just keeps convincing me not to be trusted.

Facebook mobile is a suboptimal experience, which is fine, it just reminds me to use it less.

biinjo• 11 months ago

I was going to proudly boast that I don’t have any Meta apps on my phone. Got rid of FB a long time ago, never jumped on the Instagram train.

Then I your post and now I realize I’m still in the Meta world. Forgot about whatsapp for a second.

lazide• 11 months ago

There is a reason they paid so much for it. In a lot of the world, they’re essentially required.

skylurk3• 11 months ago

On iOS, whatsapp is weirdly pushy about getting unlimited access to your photo album.

They also go out of their way to make it hard to save a photo without granting full access. Creepy.

vladvasiliu3• 11 months ago

IME giving it "limited access" works well; you can save anything without issue.

What pisses me off, though, is that I didn't find a way to give a contact a name without allowing it access to the phone's contacts.

ozgrakkurt• 11 months ago

My solution to this is to go

Photos -> share photo -> whatsapp

Instead of starting from whatsapp

orthogonal-wren• 11 months ago

What I do is open the photos app and then either copy & paste into the whatsapp message field or use the sharing dialog to share a photo / video on whatsapp. I guess that would also work for the files app. It’s extra steps but it’s worth it for me.

agile-gift02622• 11 months ago

On Android WhatsApp also requires access to all media files on the phone in order to use certain features that don't really need them, but that sound plausible.

For example, when you receive an audio message, if you want to listen to it, it will request full media access. Android apps can access media files they have created, so this permission isn't needed. But without granting media access (or tricking it into thinking it has it, like with GrapheneOS' storage scopes), WhatsApp won't let you listen to the audio. Same when trying to open an image full screen instead of just the in-chat preview.

If this were a small developer, I could assume it was done that way accidentally or to cut some corners. Coming from Meta, I can only assume malice.

daedric7• 11 months ago

While I still have WA installed for unrelated reasons, I'm so happy for Matrix Bridges...

ratg13• 11 months ago

I gave up Samsung Galaxy entirely over this .. even ended up switching to iPhone because I couldn't find another Android I liked as much.

Every Galaxy I ever owned came with uninstallable facebook apps, despite paying over 1k for the phone.

On the last one I had, I went in and did the ritual deleting facebook, and going in the settings to disable their other background apps.

I checked the phone 8 months later, and found that they had installed even more facebook apps that were now running without my consent.

That was the end of those phones for me, and I'm amazed that I put up with it for so long.

bonoboTP• 11 months ago

came with uninstallable facebook apps

You mean ununinstallable.

rpgbr• 11 months ago

I treat WhatsApp as a hostile app[1], which means I deny any access to my stuff even if I get a subpar experience. In places where it's required (as where I live), this is the bare minimum a privacy-minded person can do.

[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/a-less-affectionate-approach-...

WA• 11 months ago

Yeah but other people share their contact list with WhatsApp and they have you in there, with your name and phone number and possibly more info.

I never understood why Apple allows access to the full address book including all Apple-specific settings such as "spouse" and "home address" that are useful within iOS. There should be a minimal permission mode: name and phone number only.

BLKNSLVR• 11 months ago

I only have WhatsApp for communication in a club committee I'm on. I have a whole separate Android profile to maximise it's separation from anything and everything else.

ethagnawl• 11 months ago

I just got a new phone and have been using WhatsApp via browser. It's a fight (e.g. you have to force desktop layout) and clearly something they'd prefer you didn't do but ... it's usable. Common actions like sharing photos, replying/reacting to a message, etc. all require multiple taps and futzing with the zoom level but they are possible. There are a few actions, like viewing one-time photos which are not available and the biggest problem is that you're still tethered to a device running a fully fledged version of the app. When your session expires, you're required to authenticate again by scanning a code generated by the native app. Thankfully, my old phone is still functional and this is one of the reasons I'm keeping it around. I'm considering it tainted by Meta and, since I won't be taking new photos or doing anything substantive with it, I guess that's fine.

abdullahkhalids• 11 months ago

I have thought about it. I wonder if some smart person can figure out how to manipulate the CSS of the browser version so its easily usable on phones.

everdrive• 11 months ago

I finally got around to rebuilding my pihole. My wife's phone as absolutely rife with requests for various Real-Time Bidding (RTB) domains. It was a flood of them like I really haven't seen before. I didn't do much troubleshoot, but when we looked at her phone, the Facebook app seemed like the likeliest culprit. (Facebook, after all would be the best-placed to have the user data required to actually participate in RTB.)

Once we deleted the app, the RTB requests went away for good. I've had pihole previously, and she's had the Facebook app previously, and we never seemed to have this issue. Perhaps Facebook is drudging up whatever profits it can since it's mostly cornered the population, and is potentially in decline.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 11 months ago

Well, the good news is: I think this finally gave me a good reason ( one she would accept that is ) to convince wife to drop FB from phone.. yay...

kjok• 11 months ago

The kind of shady practices we have seen from this company, any self-respecting individual will be ashamed except Zuck. He has done more to rot the collective brain of a generation than any single figure in tech history.

The truth is, Meta isn’t building community, it’s building a surveillance hellscape where every click, glance, and pause is commodified. If you work there and still believe you're doing something good for the world, you're either delusional or willfully blind.

ath3nd4• 11 months ago

Not sure how nobody is talking about this which just happened a month ago.

https://localmess.github.io/

They have been running a sniffer agent on localhost so they can track you over VPN and incognito. Why are people still using Meta crap? They are a surveillance/spyware company.

nomilk• 11 months ago

IMO Apple should provide the user with audit logs of which photos/videos were accessed by each app. It might be a long list but it alleviates doubt and would put huge pressure on reputable developers to ensure they don’t get caught doing things the user wouldn’t have expected (even if the user technically allowed it).

wslh• 11 months ago

In the iPhone you can select which photos are accessible by apps.

merelysounds2• 11 months ago

Even better, the app can use the OS image picker and don’t have any other access to photos.

It won’t work for all use cases, but when it works it’s very practical. I’d love to see apps use that as the default - and request additional access only when the user’s current action actually requires it.

Ntrails• 11 months ago

I locked whatsapp out of my photos and contacts years ago. If I need a pic I copy paste it in.

Yes it is friction but I simply do not trust the Zuck

noname120• 11 months ago

It’s a big pain because then you have a double-picker: first pick the pictures in the native dialog asking you to decide which pictures the app should have access to, and then select again the pictures you want but this time in the WhatsApp picker. It’s very awkward.

RajT88• 11 months ago

Modern Android has this too. I'm not sure what all distros it's in, since my Pixel 8 Pro doesn't have it, but LineageOS does and so does my cheap ass Motorola G 5G.

h1fra3• 11 months ago

yeah they do that for location*, they should warn if an app is constantly accessing the camera roll

merelysounds2• 11 months ago

For what it’s worth, iOS does warn when an app has full access to the photo library for a while. E.g.:

"WhatsApp" has been able to access your entire photo library for 6 months. Do you want to continue to allow full access?

Screenshots: https://macreports.com/app-has-been-able-to-access-your-enti...

pimlottc• 11 months ago

Do you mean prompting for permission to scan local networks? “Localization” normally refers to translating an app into another language.

AndroTux2• 11 months ago

I don’t understand why apps need access to my photos at all. (with some very specific exceptions,) apps should only access a photo, which I first select using the system photo picker. There’s no need for apps to access the entire camera roll just so I can select one photo to use with that app.

I know that that’s partially implemented with the limited photo access now, but it’s confusing from a UI perspective and I don’t understand why this isn’t the default.

The only apps that need full access to my camera roll, are apps like Google Photos, Nextcloud or Immich. Everyone else can suck a lemon.

diggan3• 11 months ago

I don’t understand why apps need access to my photos at all. [...] There’s no need for apps to access the entire camera roll

So apps like Google Photos or other alternatives to the Apple made Photos app just shouldn't exist at all, if I understand you correctly?

jamwil3• 11 months ago

iOS already has exactly the experience you describe and it clearly urges you toward sharing only specific photos.

The only feature request I have is to be able to scope app permissions to an album, since the current flow of selecting individual photos adds a lot of friction.

turnsout• 11 months ago

Third party photo app developer here. You're right, it's crazy that it's basically all or nothing.

Apple actually has a great API for selecting a single photo in a privacy-respecting way which does not give the developer access to the library at all. [0] But oddly, there is no corresponding API for safely saving or updating a photo in the library. So if your app involves editing a photo, you can't use this API.

The only option you're left with is to request photo library access with that scary dialog.

If the user selects the limited access option, it's not just confusing—it's a prohibitively bad user experience. If the user snaps a new photo and wants to edit it in my app, they have to tap a "Select more photos" button in my app, find the photo in the picker, close the picker, and then select the photo again in my UI.

Personally, I evaluate full access on a developer-by-developer basis. Indie app developers are highly unlikely to nefariously scan your entire photo library, as they lack any incentive or motivation to do so. So I give apps like Darkroom or Halide full access.

Meta, on the other hand, has every incentive to scan my whole library, and I assume they would. So even though it makes posting to Instagram much more painful, I selected limited photo library access for Instagram.

Apple really needs to introduce a safe way for developers to access just the photos/videos users select, and then update those assets.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photosui/photospic...

blululu2• 11 months ago

To your point there are plenty of apps that explicitly operate on the photo reel so the api/permission is needed. Steelmanning the point: plenty of apps request photo permissions that shouldn’t need it. This is really an Apple problem though. They have their selective access option which is a patch on the problem inconvenient for the user. I have two apps that end up requesting photo permissions because basic things like saving or loading a photo require the full set of permissions. I would much rather Apple just have a widget that allows me to pipe that data in as a black box, since the pop up message is distracting and I only need the most basic capability. Instead they do some prop 65 warning where even the most basic and reasonable uses trip the warning and what’s app is allowed to scan your entire library with the same permission.

kccqzy4• 11 months ago

The copy/paste feature is underused on iOS. These days if an app needs access to a photo, I try to determine whether the app uses the system photo picker (which doesn't need the app to have photos permission). If it doesn't I simply use the Photos app to copy a photo and then paste afterwards. A benefit is that you can strip location right from the Photos app. With third party apps like Metapho which can be invoked from the share sheet, you can even strip all metadata before copying.

Some apps like WeChat somehow insist on building on their photo picker and they get the copy/paste treatment.

serial_dev• 11 months ago

AFAIK Custom photo pickers access your pictures without (hopefully) doing anything nefarious with it. With that said, 95% of apps that do that should just not use custom file pickers.

signal113• 11 months ago

iOS has had a private photo picker for a few years now, where you can pick photos from within an app without giving access to all photos.

WhatsApp doesn’t use it and Apple doesn’t hold them to account over it. So, um, yay? Apps like Signal do use it.

m4632• 11 months ago

I saw the canon camera app now needs full access to photos.

It used to just need to add to it.

this means - an external camera that wants to just add photos to the photo roll needs full access to all photos.

TallonRain• 11 months ago

They shouldn’t even need to access the camera roll at all in the vast majority of cases. The OS should simply pass photos and videos as an input to the app as an explicit user action; the camera roll itself should be a black box as far as the app is concerned.

BeFlatXIII• 11 months ago

Apple could easily fix this if they allowed apps to specify if they want the first square of the photo picker to be a camera icon (possibly even with a live preview background) or not. That's the #1 reason I see for apps using custom pickers. That or they're married to dogshit cross-platform toolkits.

Jyaif• 11 months ago

would put huge pressure on reputable developers

It wouldn't put any pressure on Meta

Razengan2• 11 months ago

Apple should also stop letting apps know that we have given them a limited photos or contacts list:

Telegram refuses to work if you provide it with just 1 dummy contact.

Some other clingy apps also get pouty and demand full roll access each time you try to use a photo.

What's even worse: For years, Apple has also allowed many apps including Facebook/TikTok/Tinder to use the "iCloud Keychain" API to store invisible information that tracks you across app reinstalls and EVEN DEVICE RESETS, because it's stored in your iCloud account, and there's no way for you to see what is stored or manually delete it without going through FB/etc and no way to be sure that they are indeed deleting everything.

I've ranted about that a few times but people just shrug it off like wtf (I imagine other people who abuse these APIs want to keep it buried)

ctippett• 11 months ago

Have you tried viewing your iCloud keychain on macOS? I'm not sure if it's inclusive of entries made from iPhone-only apps, but there's definitely an option to view entries synced to iCloud for other things.

giancarlostoro• 11 months ago

Not just Apple, Google too. Companies having zero audit trails over files they send to their servers is why I wrote off Windows for good. I noticed Microsoft Defender may randomly send files to be inspected, but there's not audit trail of what files they've sent. This is also why on iOS I force every app to only take files I hand select, I assume malicious intent from all apps. I periodically remove files they're allowed to see back down to 0.

isodev• 11 months ago

And risk their revenue? No way. It will come as “privacy preserving on-device-blabla” something that ultimately wouldn’t really protect users, only move the problem elsewhere in the stack. Like any other “privacy” feature of iOS.

kevin_thibedeau• 11 months ago

They shouldn't allow apps to give themselves permissions without an OS generated confirmation dialog. Google figured this out years ago

jackdeansmith• 11 months ago

They can't. You have to explicitly give apps permission to access your photo library.

JustExAWS2• 11 months ago

That’s not even necessary.

On your phone, go to Settingd -> Facebook -> photos -> limited access

And you can choose which photos Facebook has access to.

When you first give an app access to your photos, you have the “Limited Access” option.

moolcool• 11 months ago

I do that, but I wish I didn't have to. I have to flip through the system image picker twice every time I want to share a photo.

jameshart• 11 months ago

If you only grant ‘Limited Access’ to an app to your photos you can review and modify at any time exactly which photos each app has access to.

dataflow• 11 months ago

I feel like what they would try to do in such a case is to make up some excuse to scan all the photos so you don't know what they're actually doing.

siva7• 11 months ago

Oh I can't wait to get friend suggestions for random people from my camera roll and vice versa. Meta literally creating a social graph of all people you ever captured. Three letter agencies secretly leaching metas network cable for this extremely helpful information. At this point your camera roll can be public as well.

artk42• 11 months ago

audit logs of all privacy and sensitive-related events should be required by regulations

mbac32768• 11 months ago

This would be a great addition to GrapheneOS (hint hint)

mtmail• 11 months ago

Might be related

"Facebook patent uses image recognition to scan your personal photos for brands" https://www.fastcompany.com/90333067/creepy-facebook-patent-...

"faulty pixels, lens scratches, other ‘camera artifacts’ and metadata within the image would be used to associate Facebook users with particular images. " https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/09/18/facebook-wa...

hinkley4• 11 months ago

Zuckerberg is now the bad guy from Ready Player One in all but name.

Havoc• 11 months ago

Better yet - use the phones built in app restrictions to block or selectively allow photo access.

When a corporate does shady shit the last thing you'd do is trust the tools they provide to limit that. That's just insane.

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg

terminalshort• 11 months ago

You trust the tools because one of the few things the company can actually get in trouble for is outright lying.

amanaplanacanal2• 11 months ago

They might actually get fined a small amount!

mattbrewsbytes• 11 months ago

Meta can't scan my phone if I don't install Meta's apps on my phone.

A web browser on the phone removes the need for a lot of "apps".

randycupertino2• 11 months ago

I need whatsapp to communicate with global KOLs for work.

belinder• 11 months ago

Shouldn't they be required to offer a work phone if they require you to install an app on a phone? It may depend on where you live

const_cast3• 11 months ago

If you're running android I believe you can set up a work profile with its own apps. On graphene you definitely can, with its own filesystem and everything.

I wouldn't install work programs directly on my devices without some kind of sandboxing because of cases like this.

arnejenssen• 11 months ago

Some years ago I stopped used Snapchat, because Snapchat would occasional notify me a "highlight" with a picture from my camera roll. To do that it meant that Snapchat need to have all my pictures on their server, I figured. Not what I signed up for.

user94wjwuid• 11 months ago

this benefits few and violates the privacy of millions… can we get a some fckin privacy laws yet

greggman652• 11 months ago

If you gave them permisison isn't that on you?

iOS you can

(1) Choose no permission - Then, if you want you can go to your photos in the iOS Photos app, select a few, pick "Send to App -> Facebook" when you want to give Facebook a few photos

(2) Copy and Paste photos

(3) Choose "only selected photos" - In this case, in the Facebook app, you choose to add photos, the photos you previously gave the app permission to view appear and there's a button "Select more Photos". You can pick that and select more. I use this option peronsally

(4) Choose "all photos" - I give this permission to Google Photos since I use Google Photos to make all my photos visible across all devices.

If you choose 4, that just seems on you. You told them they could access all the photos.

klabb3• 11 months ago

Why do apps request persistent access to camera roll at all? I don't want to manage a custom set of pictures. I want to send a picture now by selecting it.

Apps like Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp refuse to show me the regular old photo picker. I have to enable "limited access" and select the same photos twice (first add to the set, then select for sharing). It's infuriating.

PS: The exception is media management apps, but those are extremely rare and irrelevant in the context of social media and communications apps.

greggman652• 11 months ago

Why do apps request persistent access to camera roll at all?

Some apps are specifically for backing up all your photos.

I want to send a picture now by selecting it.

Go to your photos, select a picture, pick send to app, pick the app

petralithic• 11 months ago

Some of these comments are interesting to read. Haven't we learned from Cambridge Analytica in 2018? Or the various other scandals over the past 20 years? I can understand normal people not caring but how people on HN still use Meta apps is beyond me.

awesan• 11 months ago

By definition they are social apps, so it's not usually up to just individuals whether to use them. For example if I stopped using what's app I'd cut myself off from the majority of my friends and family.

dfxm123• 11 months ago

This is probably not true. If it is, if your ties are so weak that they rely on an app, maybe it is ok to let them go and seek stronger social ties elsewhere.

frasermarlow• 11 months ago

If you're not paying for it, you are the product.

dfxm123• 11 months ago

Even if you are paying for it, you are still the product (I guess "a" product). Meta (or whoever) is not going to give up revenue streams just because you're giving them money too. Realistically, for consumer products like this, preventing user tracking and data collection would have to be legislated and enforced.

SirMaster2• 11 months ago

How is the app accessing my photos on iOS when I have not given the app permission to access photos? Did they really find some exploit around this? Or is this photos permission really not the only way?

flanbiscuit• 11 months ago

Same question for Android.

My guess is that this only affects people who have granted FB the permission already.

dns_snek• 11 months ago

It doesn't sound like they're accessing your photos without the app being granted permission to do so in iOS. It sounds like they're abusing that permission (if granted) for nefarious purposes that users didn't agree to.

So you granted Facebook permission to access your files in order to share a photo in some group 3 months ago, but now they secretly abuse that permission to scan your entire library for AI training.

SirMaster2• 11 months ago

I guess if I grant an app access to all my photos, then I assume they can access them all whenever, unless I revoke that access after.

hypersoar• 11 months ago

Years ago, I installed the Facebook app on my phone. I immediately uninstalled it when I saw, horrified, that it had hoovered up all my photos and uploaded them to Facebook (there was no fine-grained storage permission at the time) "for my convenience". I never ran their app on my phone, again.

baconbrand• 11 months ago

what if my library was trillions of photos of poop shaped like a face

prism562• 11 months ago

I want that model...

markus_zhang2• 11 months ago

One way to deal with the current mess is to use a dumb enough phone only for banking/insurance/chat, a dumb phone for calling and texting, and a camera for photos. It’s less convenient but it’s better for privacy.

inetknght2• 11 months ago

and a camera for photos. It’s less convenient but it’s better for privacy.

Hope you don't use Microsoft or Apple products to manage the photos on your Camera.

markus_zhang2• 11 months ago

You have a point. I'll probably just dump them into a HD using a simple script.

gmd63• 11 months ago

Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuckerberg: Just ask

Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.

Zuckerberg: I don't know why.

Zuckerberg: They "trust me"

Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks

Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)

whalesalad• 11 months ago

Is it 2012? We've known this forever.

Workaccount2• 11 months ago

Meta is by far the most shamelessly insensitive tech giant. They must actively seek out the most morally depraved devs, I can only imagine the people in those meetings when discussing some of these implementations must have been laughing at how devious they are.

seanw4443• 11 months ago

The devs get paid a fine salary, and can't afford it lose it, or they'll probably miss payments on their expensive vehicles and houses. So they do as they're told and don't complain.

kridsdale1• 11 months ago

Speaking as someone who joined them before they were like this, and left when they became this, Meta attracts talent by paying 50% more than anyone else. It’s very hard to leave when you get used to it.

PhantomHour• 11 months ago

"Before they were like this"

I would like to remind you that Facebook got it's start as a sex pest website.

touristtam2• 11 months ago

The banality of evil, was the central them of Hannah Arendt thesis while working on the coverage of Eichmann trial by the Hebrew state of Israel. I doubt people attempt to join Facebook to apply their devious nature, more like that FB is paying handsomely to not think too hard about the goal of the organisation and the means to reach those goals.

jkubicek2• 11 months ago

Facebook has been doing this for well over a decade. I once got a notification from the Facebook app, "Do you want to share this photo with Kim?" because Kim was just randomly in the distant background of a photo I had taken of my daughter at kindergarten drop-off. I deleted the Facebook app that day and I make a point to never give any social media app access to my photo library.

shortrounddev2• 11 months ago

There are hundreds of ways to secure a laptop and ensure your privacy. Why are there almost no good ways to use a smartphone in a secure and private way?

fsflover• 11 months ago

There's only one way to secure a laptop: use Qubes OS. It requires a lot of resources for the virtualization, and on the phone, it's not profitable for Apple and Google.

prmoustache• 11 months ago

You can if you don't use a google certified rom, use primilarily a browser instead of apps and do not install the google play stuff.

jpl56• 11 months ago

1 : open the Facebook app.

Nope... I'm using a link to my Facebook homepage saved on the home screen.

polytely• 11 months ago

Facebook seems like an exceptionally morally rotten company, which I guess just stems from Zuck being in control.

toss1• 11 months ago

The big tech companies are now becoming archetypal evil — directly analogous with the ancient stories of 'deals with the devil'.

The devil cannot take your soul, but if he can get you to agree to a deal... well... good luck with that.

Here, the devil gets you to agree to some nice beneficial feature like "camera sharing suggestions ... for personalized creative ideas, like travel highlights and collages" or "cloud processing" for whatever benefit. AAaand you do, and there goes all your private photos. And the devil can rightly claim "but this is a mere contract dispute and the user agreed to all of this".

The ancient tales were supposed to be warnings, not How-To guides.

And of course now, these modern devils are just flipping the "Agree" button under the software all without your actual consent.

I do not let ANY Meta property or software run on any of my devices. If only everyone did the same.

TheRoque• 11 months ago

Mmmh well a few months ago there was a news that Facebook will prompt you to ask you if you are ok with your personal pictures being used for training, so it's not really surprising ? Besides, it's meta, what do people expect seriously ?

emchammer• 11 months ago

They’re not, and they can’t, because I don’t use Meta.

imhoguy• 11 months ago

They can much more than you can imagine. I bet you have installed at least one 3-rd party app with Facebook SDK bundled in and profiling you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44763949

reactordev5• 11 months ago

Meta isn’t just crawling your photos. If you gave it permission not just “While using the app” to anything, it’s gathering up metadata about you and sending it home. Contacts, emails, location, imei, photos, video exif, browser history if you happen to open a mini-safari view from an ad, app usage statistics, your IP address, your device information, anything they can gather - they are.

I uninstalled Facebook, Meta, MetaQuest, Instagram and deleted my accounts. I’ll never put one of their apps on my phone again.

inetknght2• 11 months ago

Facebook, Meta, MetaQuest, Instagram and deleted my accounts. I’ll never put one of their apps on my phone again.

Hope you also removed WhatsApp, a very popular chat app especially outside the USA.

reactordev5• 11 months ago

Yup, anything Meta backed, not on my phone.

Groxx• 11 months ago

Even without permission, they're doing as much as they can technically manage: https://localmess.github.io/

Uninstall is indeed the only option. There is no way in hell this is the last time they do something like this, nor is it the first.

reactordev5• 11 months ago

Some of those data brokers have no qualms with breaking cybersecurity laws either.

int_19h• 11 months ago

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

matsemann• 11 months ago

A few years ago I scrolled Facebook on my phone and suddenly saw a post with a picture from my phone and my heart skipped a beat. It was not a real public post, but a suggestion from fb ala "share this pic with your followers? This is how it will look like".

Immediately removed all permissions, insane to take a photo from my camera roll and do that. Imagine if it was some nsfw picture suddenly being integrated into my feed while scrolling in public or so..

mikewarot• 11 months ago

A gentle reminder to the readers here at HN that it doesn't have to be this way. Computer Security is a solved problem[1], and has been so since the 1980s[2].

It's my strong opinion that the only methods you've seen to this point[3-7] were deliberately chosen to be ones that don't work, and make things worse in the long run.

It's my hope that things will change for the better, but when I think about what group could lead that change, there's No Such Agency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_operating_sys...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_permissions

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

7373737373• 11 months ago

THIS, a billion times, for every insecure device, every popular operating system running today, and every popular programming language.

NONE of these systems were conceived or built with capability security in mind, none of them are even appreciably moving in this direction. None of them provide their developers or users user friendly interfaces for fine grained control and oversight of file system, networking, computing and memory resource usage.

They don't allow developers to hollow out the attack surface of their programs by compartmentalization and reifying rights as objects as CapSec prescribes; they cannot, due to their fundamentally broken architectures, provide powerful guarantees such as: "this part of the code cannot access any other resources and is restricted to pure computation, its only effect will be the result it returns".

That no one is seeing this, listening and learning, is a disgrace, a collective, civilization-scale failure to apply this knowledge. The exploits will continue until we learn. And until user agents and their creators are forced, by choice and by law, to truly act to the best of their ability in the best interest of their user.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege

seanw4443• 11 months ago

GrapheneOS is too precious. Being able to pretend like the app has full access to my gallery, while only specifically allowing certain directories or photos, is awesome. I've actually discovered that selecting a photo in the gallery and "sharing" it to a Messenger chat skips the need for it to be in the allowed directory, so I've been doing that too. Anyone know if that's working as intended, or if it's a potential security hole?

And yes, putting Messenger on my GrapheneOS phone is dumb, but my normal people friends all use Messenger, so that's where our group chats are. Best I can do is fail to convince them to install an XMPP client and join my self-hosted server, or minimize the impact of Messenger.

knallfrosch• 11 months ago

putting Messenger on my GrapheneOS phone is dumb

Depends on your intentions. Privacy, security?

seanw4443• 11 months ago

Both. Without completely cutting myself off from friends.

hinkley4• 11 months ago

I don’t know if it’s discord or apple but there is something akin to this on iOS now. You can cherry pick which images are accessible. Kind of a pain actually when trying to tell a joke, but understandable why it exists.

minitech• 11 months ago

For sharing to be a mechanism to transfer data between apps without needing excess permissions is intended, yes.

Gud• 11 months ago

The people working at Meta are generally pretty tech savvy, while the general public isn't. Meta is an extremely rich company, and their employees are well compensated.

My question then is, when does this exploitative behaviour become criminal.

And if it isn't criminal, how do we make it so.

If you are working for Meta and you consider yourself a moral person, you should quit your job.

There are more important things in this world than making money. Help build a better world. You can live a comfortable life without helping Mark Zuckerberg ruin the planet. You can even make a lot of money, if that is what you dream of.

superblas• 11 months ago

I was just at one of their offices in San Francisco. They have free breakfast, lunch, and dinner with choices from well over 10 whole restaurants exclusively on their campus. They have (paid) laundry service where they can just drop off their clothes and get them back later. No more Facebook barbers, however. There were people of all different backgrounds: black, white, Hispanic, Indian, etc.

They have all these amenities on top of their huge paychecks (high cost of living in San Francisco notwithstanding). Do you really think they’d give all that up in service of helping their lessers? Maybe some would, but how much of this extravagant lifestyle would they give up? Even those who identify as liberal, how much would they give up?

Jigsy• 11 months ago

Even if you make it criminal, the law doesn't (and shouldn't) operate retroactively. Just saying.

olelele• 11 months ago

My last impression of Facebook was that configuring the account settings had become more like setting up a fresh raspbian install or configuring a phone. Too many privacy intruding settings to count. I get the feeling that most people don't care enough and just leave everything on default, which is on.

I think Facebook is deeply scammy now.

I deleted my accounts a few years ago and never looked back.

Nevermark2• 11 months ago

The setting was turned on for me. And there is no way I explicitly granted access.

I don't understand why Mark Zuckerberg isn't in jail, or via a "no admission of guilt" agreement, prohibited from being a corporate executive, at this point.

My ungranted personal information should be mine, with force of law, just as much as Meta's trade secrets are theirs.

jjtheblunt• 11 months ago

I don't understand why Mark Zuckerberg isn't in jail

that made me think, how is it there are groups of political extreme protestors both anti-Trumpers and MAGA-ers, but no group protesting Zuckerberg's shenanigans in such media-covered fashion?

How is money flowing to make this our reality? i don't pretend to know

mobiledev2014• 11 months ago

CEO-hate is bipartisan and antithetical to the mission of our media (propaganda). Getting the working class to argue over wedge issues keeps them from seeking meaningful change.

hinkley4• 11 months ago

Have you read Careless People? Get ready to hate him much more, even if you only believe half of what she wrote. Also his second in command practically has class action status for sexual harassment at this point.

de6u99er• 11 months ago

I remember when Facebook hired George Hotz. The idea was to circumvent phone security and privacy settings.

rootnod3• 11 months ago

Meta abuses permissions when given? Shocked, I am SHOCKED I tell you. Next up: Google scans your emails, news at 11.

KaiserPro3• 11 months ago

For what it's worth, I don't think facebook are scanning your photos.

the biggest reason is that probably enough of a ToS violation to get them yeeted from the app store.

It looks like its using metadata to work out when to nagg you.

ath3nd4• 11 months ago

And some people like you also thought facebook are respecting incognito mode and not starting a spyware agent server int the background of your device, but they were wrong.

https://localmess.github.io/

KaiserPro3• 11 months ago

Thanks for the insinuation there, it means a lot.

The reason why I said this is because its not part of the advertising team. The advertising team can do all sorts of shit because it makes them money. The rest of the company have more constraints.

The ads pricks are not the ones that have to ask the app store to let them back on, when one of the builds gets tagged as non-compliant.

Now, its not impossible, but unlikely. if it was something to with Ads, I'd be less sure.

ChrisMarshallNY• 11 months ago

It sounds like this may not be happening on iOS. I have not found a way to access the Photos library, without the user being asked for explicit permission to do so.

But I also haven't really tried. I use Photos and the Camera in some of the apps I've written, and fully expect users to be asked. I ask for minimal permissions, as well.

If Meta is bypassing user permission, then that's a truly dire security breach, and Apple needs to bring down the banhammer fast.

snickerbockers• 11 months ago

might

I appreciate your objectiviy but they definitely are.

sub7• 11 months ago

Xiaomi's HyperOS has many flaws but one great thing it does is have an app behaviour settings page that shows what app used what permission and when.

It allows you to toggle permissions on a per app per permission basis but sadly this toggle doesn't always work.

Still useful knowing how much you get spied on.

jimt1234• 11 months ago

... it's not available in Illinois or Texas due to those states' privacy laws.

This stuck out to me. How are laws like this typically applied? My guess is it's geo-based only, right? That is, take an Illinois resident who spends 99% of her time in her home state - if she travels to California for a weekend, can Facebook (legally) grab her camera roll data during that time? And vice-versa, myself, as a CA resident who spends 99% of his time at home - if I go to Texas for the weekend, Facebook is gonna have to wait until I return home to (legally) access my camera roll?

baby_souffle• 11 months ago

That might be how they implement it technically, but I think the rules allow for some wiggle room.

If I move to a new state, I typically have a grace period to change the state of registration on my vehicle. I'm not immediately penalized for having out of state plates the very next day but if I get pulled over 3 months after I've moved, I might have a tougher time.

janandonly• 11 months ago

Why on earth would you install any Meta spy app on your phone at all?

And why would you give that app full photo access?

hinkley4• 11 months ago

Meta might be secretly scanning your mom’s phone’s camera roll.

Seriously how many of us are still on FB? How many of us have friends and family who still are?

hilbert42• 11 months ago

"Seriously how many of us are still on FB?"

Billions unfortunately! Almost everyone I deal with is. I reckon I'm about the only person I know who is not on one form of social media or another and or deeply involved with Google apps/using its Cloud.

I've banned relatives taking my photo because I know it'll end up on Facebook, Google or others despite my wishes to the contrary. No matter what I say I know they can't help themselves (so does Big Tech—that's its modus operandi).

I've come to the conclusion there's no point trying to convince others about privacy, data mining by Meta et al. All I can do is to try to minimize others spilling my personal data onto Big Tech's data collection highways.

prism562• 11 months ago

Yeah pretty annoying this.

I send my parents photos of my daughter and they probably just end up being scanned by their meta/google apps and trained. Where as I try take precautions.

You literally can't opt out of face scanning if somebody else has taken or has access to a photo of you. I should be able to delete my facedata or when it detects its me it doesn't train.

ks20483• 11 months ago

Could a proxy service (like Charles) see if photos are leaving your device? It seems "scanning your photos" could mean doing something on device or sending your data elsewhere. The former seems like it would be a much bigger scandal.

dmayle• 11 months ago

I used to work at Meta (back when it was just Facebook), and I pioneered a similar effort back in 2016-2017-ish. Now, I don't know anything about the current version (which seems to offer cloud processing as well), but when I was there, the effort was entirely local to the phone.

We had caffe2 running a small model on the phone to try and select and propose photos for the user to share.

We were trying to offer an alternative sharing model that both made sharing easier, while offering the user the controls that made them feel comfortable with photo suggestions. (for those who never noticed, we launched Moments, which was an app that allowed automatic private sharing of your camera roll with a close selection of friends and family, but the experience wasn't great because it was centered around group events and sharing photos with the people who were there, not connecting with the ones who weren't)

Ultimately, it was scrapped, because we were paranoid that we hadn't come up with a user experience that made it clear that this was happening only on the phone (I think we even tried a notification model), or that we'd accidentally surface someone's boudoir photos, and we were too worried about the kind of knee-jerk reactions that you're seeing in this thread.

I'm guessing that someone at Meta either had a more successful go at the UX, or they feel that the opinions about AI have shifted enough that there will be less fear.

Upon reading the article, it looks like there are two options, one which is local-only, and similar to what we built, and a second one which tries to make better suggestions using online, and that is only enabled after asking the user.

I would suspect that the cloud processing version also runs a local model to attempt to filter out racy photos before sending them to the cloud, but I don't know for sure.

I think the article is a bit disingenuous in it's presentation, but it's possible that I'm biased because I know how a similar thing was built, but it definitely sounds like fear-mongering.

tomrod• 11 months ago

It better not be. I have no app and no account on their service. They bring no value to the world.

deepsun• 11 months ago

It's not hard to live without any Meta apps in US.

Some other countries require WhatsApp though.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 11 months ago

HN changed the title

Original title chosen by the author:

Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off

ath3nd4• 11 months ago

We are talking about Meta, the company that:

-was rhe main party in the Cambridge analytica saya misuse scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

- Was responsible for the genocide in Myanmar https://time.com/6217730/myanmar-meta-rohingya-facebook/

- Actually pirated books to train their trash llama AI and lied about it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

- Had a sniffer backdoor on Android to track you even through VPN and incognitomodes, an approach shared with Yandex

https://localmess.github.io/

- The CEO repeatedly lied to congress https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

- They spent billions on the metaverse which shows how stipid and out of touch they are

And now we are surprised that they are sniffing your photos. Please, I won't be surprised if they sniff your photos even if you don't consent. At this moment it's absolutely clear that they are an adversarial actor which can't be trusted with absolutely anything.

greatgib• 11 months ago

Opened the article and was immediately turned on by their cookie popup:

   We Care About Your Privacy 
   We and our 924 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device.

No, you don't...

techtivist• 11 months ago

Honestly, along with this recent news - Meta seems to be its most brazen phase since going public in 2012 https://www.adweek.com/media/whistleblower-alleges-meta-arti... (See the section Recovery from Apple’s privacy changes) Cambridge Analytica was perhaps more about incompetence than complicity. But the patterns now seem intentional, and reminiscent of its early days documented well in Steven Levy's book.

Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos

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