Facebook iOS app has camera active during use
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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
As a user, how could you possibly know which of these settings was the straw that broke the camels back or the relative impact of each?
Their decision to allow you to access all features as well as your battery can handle (and eventually the option to take the guard rails off, too) is IMO the simplest and cleanest way of solving this problem.
Due to Apples planned obsolescence making it an absolute nightmare to replace a consumable part because its lifespan lines up nicely with how often they would like you to buy a new device.
Imo it is absolutely critical that a new law be introduced that batteries on consumer hardware must be user replaceable if we want to have any hope in protecting the planet. It would not be hard at all for phones to have user replaceable batteries. Most android phones did for a long time and most laptops just had switches on the bottom to eject the battery.
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.
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.
One setting that seems to have impacted my phone’s performance is the “Optimize storage” setting that works in conjunction with iCloud and Apple Music. What seems to happen is that iOS will fill up my phone’s 64gb capacity before purging photos and music into the cloud. This results in aggressive memory management, resulting in many safari tabs reloading, and apps starting cold again. Often times apps in in the home screen will flicker “cleaning” in their names, which apparently iOS does when running low on storage space.
This all cascades into the slow loading times described in my original post. Not the best UX, but better than manually managing storage on my phone. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this setting, so I don’t think my experience is uncommon.
AFAIK that's not allowed for iOS software, all programs must work even if the permissions are denied or redacted.
Launch app Chats tab is active by default Tap the chat icon lower right side Whatsapp "To help you connect... allow access to your contacts. Not now or continue"
I tap not now, and am returned to Chats and no way to manually enter a number. Tap the chat icon again, same thing.
Android app info for Whatsapp says no permissions.
This is Android 9. Deleting and reinstalling hasn't changed this behavior.
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.
You just paid money for pushing your personal data to Google.
I use clear Android-x86 VM with wiped Google Services for this, maybe several times for year.
The only data on this phone are contacts who have contacted me on WhatsApp; it has about 50 contacts compared to my main phone that has an order of magnitude more, and which ttbomk no FANG has access to or a copy of; the war is lost though, because every message/call has at least one more party and almost all of them do give all that info away to google, Facebook and Microsoft (giving Skype access to contacts)
Alas, where I live, NOT using WhatsApp would put me at a much worse disadvantage than the $80 I paid.
Last time I used Whatsapp, there was no way to chat with someone who was not in Contacts, on Android. I first had to add each person to Contacts before Whatsapp would let me chat with them.
Maybe you can use a number link (https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000030/) without the permission, but I’m not sure.
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.
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)
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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)
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.
Even assuming innocent intentions, I wonder if image data would still end up in crash dumps or app analytics.
Definitely disturbing having it pop out and you know something is trying to read it.
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.
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.)
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.
If you can process the images on the phone for cheap (modern phones can do that) you can send only the relevant metadata
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Looks like a Hanlon’s Razor situation.
In the absense of evidence to the contrary assume that outcome matches intent.
I removed camera and microphone privileges from the app when I saw this, which means I can’t create Stories anymore.
Now I have lots of productive hours.
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.
The one (unrelatedly) thing I still feel is missing is the ability to deny an app any network access. You can deny an app access to the cellular network, but the only types of apps that you can deny any network access are keyboards.
Facebook doesn’t use the SafariViewController that can take advantage of content blockers.
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.
https://reclaimthenet.org/iphone-facebook-camera-access-bug/
So far it seems to only affect iOS 13.2. for iphone 8 or older devices
I was under the impression that was baked into the OS?