Instagram promises to fix bug after always accessing the camera on iOS 14
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
Being a photo app, they probably figured out that having instant access to Camera is their top priority, and because you are allowed to access camera in the background and keep it on, there was no harm in doing so.
Of course one could also go deep and assume that Facebook is running all video through an ML that picks out faces, location, items, and whatever else they can grab around your surrounding, and then covert that into ad-intent, but however sexy that sounds from technical point, they are after all a public company and need to play by the rules. Unlikely to take on such a massive intrusion of your privacy, knowing that eventually it would get discovered.
You completely lost me here. We’re talking about Facebook, the company with a near infinite supply and history of privacy issues. Facebook has shown that rules don’t apply to it for as long as it can get away with it. Behind the scenes, it laughs at fines imposed by governments because they’re too tiny to have a material impact on the future of the company and its earnings.
You have a point: Facebook is using the iPhone’s camera as users scroll their feed, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513471
> We're really, reallllllly sorry and promise to do better.
Any day now....
Would probably be very hard to spot that if you piggyback on normal story/image upload traffic payloads. Seems like a lot of work for something that's not really that helpful or easier to accomplish.
That could be said for Facebook surreptitiously uploading images by piggybacking them onto innocuous requests.
I’ve disabled the FB app’s cert pinning so I can MITM it and they really don’t seem to care about minimizing the number of requests. Tons of little logging events will be fired off separately instead of being condensed. Also, there are several unofficial Instagram apps that were developed by thoroughly reverse engineering the app’s private API. Seems unlikely that this could have evaded detection.
And just data volume-wise, it’s much harder to conceal uploading weighty images/video. Facebook and Instagram mostly just download data. A long term discrepancy in upload usage between when the app has camera permissions and when it doesn’t would be easy to spot.
I have no doubt Facebook is still doing creepy things we don't know about yet, but this particular theory just seems incredibly unlikely to me.
Under other circumstances, yes perhaps. But in the case of a Facebook, with their complete disregard for privacy and search for more and more ways to collect data, this seems like an explicit feature implementation.
Complete? Aren’t you exaggerating?
There were hundreds much worse leaks than any Facebook leak. Any credit card leak is much worse. But Facebook is an easy hatred target.
Nothing bad really happened as result of these leaks. Nobody harmed, nobody lost money, and don’t start again on that CA story which happened and fixed several years before you learned about it.
and budgeting for fines and legal fees as contingency for when pseudo legal practises that have business beneifits are discovered is standard practice in most large corporations
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-bug-has-camera-activated-...
funny however how often this 'bug' reappears
That's not true. The camera could quite easily have been intentionally enabled at applciation startup in order to have simplified code or instant responses later.
Also IG Stories is where all the filters live.
I don't think that's a reason for them not to do it. They could just claim it was an accident, they weren't really collecting the data, etc etc ad infinitum and most people would continue to use facebook just as they always have.
The day I uninstalled the facebook app was the day it asked for permission to read all text messages (on top of the many, many other permissions it already had). I figured the next step would be audio and video (after all, there wasn't much left to ask for at that point).
As you scroll your feed, they analyze your face, and use your expressions to see how you feel about a particular post. It’s like “likes” on steroids.
They already have the face detection, expression detection, etc code built into their app through the filters and those act in real time and locally. It would be super easy to redirect that towards analyzing user expressions in response to posts they may be reading at the time.
The correct answer to what is going on is Facebook's official response in the article.
Because that’s all they need. And even less than normal because you don’t need to figure out bunny ears and exaggerated smiles. Simply whether a person is smiling or not.
It’s obvious speculation.
But it makes a lot of sense.
But there are no evidence to believe it is a malicious intent. Just speculations.
There are software engineers, designers, project managers, etc., at Facebook who implemented this bug/feature, right? Given the competitive nature of recruiting and employment at Facebook, this feature was not thrown in by accident, or as a bad joke. This behaviour was implemented as part of a bigger feature, or by itself. It was designed, prioritized, and consciously scheduled for implementation, testing, and deployment. It won against other competing ideas with respect to scheduling, budget, and fulfilling team, departmental, and organizational objective key results (OKRs).
Artifacts that mention this behaviour exist: whether it be in email chains, project-planning and task-management tools like JIRA, commit messages from version control systems like git, deployment logs, and many, many other such things.
Some of those people participate in this forum. Some others no doubt know who they are or who they could be to fair degree of accuracy. Do the rest of us care? Or, do we just point fingers like we are doing now and then go back to hibernating / feigning ignorance until the next time something like this happens again?
Interviewing at FAANG is about cracking the interview and the tests; it doesn't reflect all the skills that would be relevant in the real world. You can very well be a mediocre engineer but grind Leetcode all day long and eventually pass the interview (and the reverse is also true, a lot of otherwise great engineers wouldn't be able to pass their test), so just because the code is written by FAANG doesn't mean it's bug-free or that the bugs were deemed important enough to be fixed.
Where does it do that? As far as I can tell, Instagram is calling the camera APIs when it doesn't need to and iOS is flagging that as it should.
> We found and are fixing a bug in [the instagram app for] iOS 14 Beta
I wouldn't even be surprised if this is part of Instagram having a goal to make opening camera capture really fast. They've done very similar things intentionally before. [0][1]
[0]: https://speakerdeck.com/mikeyk/secrets-to-lightning-fast-mob... [1]: https://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/05/01/instagrams-secret-t...
It’s generally a happier way to live and view the world.
A reality in which many companies might regularly get away with malice by just claiming incompetence? As if that should even have any influence on their (legal) responsibilities in the first place(?)
Assuming malice does happen, and I certainly think it does, at which point would you consider this approach willful ignorance? Would it not make one actually part of the problem, instead of just an observer?
More to the point, when is personal happiness more important than discovering the truth? Is the latter not a personal responsibility to anyone, given a capacity?
Assumption is what we go on when we have no proof - so, until you have proof, assume incompetence.
Making this initial assumption (effectively giving the benefit of the doubt) does not mean you should stop looking for proof/under lying reasons.
What it does is reduce the dopamine hit you get from being angered/outraged and let’s you think with a clearer head moving forward in your thinking/investigating.
I at no point said “assume incompetence and then stick your head in the sand and pretend all is fine” that’s has its own saying “ignorance is bliss”
For instance, and this is really one of many — Facebook took phone numbers from users for 2FA, promising it’d only be used for security and... used those numbers for ads[1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...
No, closing your eyes and chewing through the legbone bitd of your colleague in your sausage is not the move.
Additionally, it's a beta version of iOS, so we're supposed to be expecting bugs anyway.
Anyone else noticed that? Is it along the same lines as the camera usage bug, or maybe they are just ferociously recording app usage analytics?
The worst possibility is that IG's always recording my screen (perhaps in concert with the front camera) but successfully suppressing the bar most of the time, and only sometimes the workaround stops working so screeen recording bar shows up for a second. That would be so far from a welcome development.
Edit: can't remember that for sure, could be no icon then you'd be correct, not that it helps much (not sure which one would be worse).
*by Facebook
"Competition is for losers."
— Peter Thiel
That isn't to say that Facebook Inc. (the parent company) doesn't have their hands in the Instagram pot, because they obviously do and it only seems natural based on their past behavior they'll integrate heavily and push way past bounds they should be allowed to. All of that said, it doesn't mean the other poster is wrong about making it known this is a problem inside of Instagram rather than in Messenger or Facebook (the app).
I understand where you're coming from; being able to deflect their transgressions on a child company and then toss it aside and rebrand when it gets too much heat isn't a way they should be able to operate; heck, I'm just as skeptical as anyone that this is just a "bug" and have personally disliked FB's practices for a while; however, it doesn't make sense to start treating all products from large companies as if they're all just one single thing. In my mind, I akin it to Google having a pretty gnarly bug in GMail, but then everyone not being able to separate it from Search; it feels like an apt comparison to me, especially since Google is just a few steps down from the nefariousness of FB in some people's minds.
My critique has less to do with bugs or with the programmers who are coding these apps, and more to do with the parasitic business models and the proprietary underlying functions and capabilities that these engineers are asked to implement by the Venture Capitalist-backed Silicon Valley-startups they work for. Or more precisely, my critique has to do with the dynamics of the corporatocracy and technocracy and how it relates to our economic system, including the effects on humanity's health and the health of our planet.
I don't think we'll be able to really have a good discourse on this since we're approaching it from two different areas of discussion, but I appreciate your response.
I am not saying whether the camera behavior is incompetence or malice, I am just saying that "download your data" features rarely give you all your data, both for malicious reasons (in the case of Facebook) as well as technical reasons (some data in raw form might belong to multiple individuals so you can't just give them that raw version and need to write extra code to sanitize that data which might not have been done yet so until then you would be missing that data).