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Bug Blamed for Instagram Unexpectedly Accessing Camera in iOS 14
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It's something that's in iOS 14, and it's basically more of a "dot" than a "light" per se, which appears in the status bar (similar to a red one that appears when something might be accessing the microphone).
Yes. It’s only because of Apple that these things are being brought to our attention.
The next Header might read:
"Mark Zuckerberg (unexpectedly) "accidentally" sells the personal info and private data of 120 million Americans to the Chinese Red Army intelligence bureau, Mossad, ISIS, the FBI, and Putin's FSB secret service and receives $3 billion in return. Facebook states that this was caused by a simple software glitch."
"Mark Zuckerberg (unexpectedly) "accidentally" sells the personal info and private data of 120 million Americans to the Chinese Red Army intelligence bureau, Mossad, ISIS, the FBI, and Putin's FSB secret service and receives $3 billion in return. Facebook states that this was caused by a simple software glitch."
If this kind of thing has been around for who knows how long -- in general when it comes to camera/microphone/etc. use -- why did it take all the way until iOS 14 for it to actually be brought to attention?
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The problem is Instagram...there is no other similar or competing product just like Google's YouTube.
Yeah, I hate it when devs accidentally call totally unrelated APIs, static testing, static analysis, multiple submission reviews, and regression testing from the last time this “mistake” was made doesn’t catch it.
Mistake the first time FB did this was dubious (how many times have you “accidentally” used your toilet brush to brush your teeth?). The second time, oh, come on...
Mistake the first time FB did this was dubious (how many times have you “accidentally” used your toilet brush to brush your teeth?). The second time, oh, come on...
Seems like one of the bigger questions to answer is exactly how that new notification functionality (via the colored dots) works when it comes to camera and microphone.
Does it come on when those are actually in use or in some other situations? Can it all somehow be controlled on app side of things as this supposed bug might be implying? Can there be some bugs around how it all works in general in iOS 14 given that it's still in its beta phase?
Part of the statement about all of this which says, "We found and are fixing a bug in iOS 14 Beta that mistakenly indicates that some people are using the camera when they aren’t." almost seems to imply that somehow the notification can come up even when there's supposedly nothing triggering it.
Does it come on when those are actually in use or in some other situations? Can it all somehow be controlled on app side of things as this supposed bug might be implying? Can there be some bugs around how it all works in general in iOS 14 given that it's still in its beta phase?
Part of the statement about all of this which says, "We found and are fixing a bug in iOS 14 Beta that mistakenly indicates that some people are using the camera when they aren’t." almost seems to imply that somehow the notification can come up even when there's supposedly nothing triggering it.
It's been known for years that Facebook has been finding ways to circumvent Apple's built in security measures in iOS. And why does it matter? It's here now. Apple is doing their best to prevent things like this. Would you rather they just do nothing? Or will you just keep being upset by the past? The fact that a company as gargantuan as Apple still cares about privacy is pretty unheard of. What other companies are catching others red handed like Apple is doing now?
And yet continually turning a blind eye, heck outright assisting, the CCP and Chinese apps like TikTok.
But please, continue to regale us with tales of Apple’s righteous struggle for us, the Little People.
Issue is, Apple’s guilty of it too. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the iOS 14 Camera app accesses the microphone in Photo mode with Live Photos disabled. It shouldn’t be recording audio for a Live Photo, which again I have disabled, and I’m not recording a video, so why’s it accessing the microphone in Photo mode?
Of course, I’m willing to concede that this is human error rather than evidence of a conspiracy to listen in on billions of Camera app users, because even and perhaps especially at Apple and Facebook’s scale, doing so is simply impractical.
Props to Apple for exposing this sort of thing, otherwise I'm sure 'bugs' like this would happily carry on everywhere. An app like this has NO BUSINESS accessing the camera for anything other than when you're taking a photo.
I've removed the apps access to microphone and camera.
I've removed the apps access to microphone and camera.
The camera indicator dot appears if a camera session is active in the app, which happens (for example) when you open the Camera app on your phone to take a picture. The green dot appears right when the camera is activated, and its presence does not necessarily mean that the app is actually capturing anything — think of it more like “ready to capture or actively capturing” so that apps can implement viewfinders, filters, and so on, as well as actually capture images/video.
These camera sessions must be manually stopped in code by calling a
stopRunning() method on the camera session (for example, you go to another view which doesn’t require camera access), or they can be stopped by the system for situations like a user leaving the app (as iOS doesn’t allow apps to use the camera in the background). iOS can’t tell which of an app’s user interactions necessitate stopping a camera session, which is why developers have to do so manually in code. In this case, it’s highly likely that Instagram has a code path to take a user from a camera view to a non-camera view, except they forget to stop the camera session.The microphone indicator dot appears if an app is capturing audio from the microphone. Contrary to the camera indicator icon, this does mean that the app is capturing audio. That’s because there’s no notion of a viewfinder for audio; an app has no reason to access the microphone except to actively record/process input audio.
More importantly, neither indicator implies that data from the camera and/or microphone is being transmitted anywhere off of the device.
I didn't say anything about it not being good that it's there now. It doesn't mean that we can't wonder why something rather straightforward and important as that wasn't there before. After all, this sort of thing has been around on Macs and computers for a long time (so not a new concept), and even camera permissions have been around in iOS for a while (so also the importance and concept of that has been known in relation to iOS for some time too).
It's not even about catching anyone, but simply providing notification to the user that the camera/microphone/etc. is being used to capture something that that moment.
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All fairly good points to keep in mind.
Some good details. Seems like in either situation it would be based on something being in use and capturing something (on device or not), and shouldn't be controllable by any app (at least not beyond whether or not the app actually starts or stops capturing something).
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Haha, very funny, simply don’t use these social media B$. Now facebook have pics & movies of many people sitting on their bowls. Sure “just” a bug. Anyway, people are resistant to learning, and will keep using. Someday their data privacy security will blow up hard, but then it will be too late to repent using these services.
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Thats not only a iOS/Apple issue. Access is access, regardless if its iOS, macOS, Windows, Linux. Think a bit further, about how many Apps have access hardware disks, network shares, app database like iOS Photos, clipboards, ... we trust too much...
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It's a different story between the microphone and camera because there are far more diverse use cases for the latter. For the microphone, you can’t have a viewfinder to see what audio you want to capture before you start recording (as opposed to an image/video) because that, well, doesn’t make sense. Because of that, the microphone indicator is pretty binary: The app is either actively capturing audio or it’s not.
For the camera, as I mentioned, there are so many more (and more diverse) use cases, which makes it far more difficult to Apple to implement a one-size-fits-all solution for capturing images and videos from the camera. That’s why they offer a stripped-down Camera interface to apps (with camera authorization required from the user, of course), but fairly few apps actually use it — in fact, even Apple’s own Messages camera view doesn’t use it because they wanted to add additional functionality like stickers and Memoji.
Instead, many apps create their own capture interface, which has its benefits like far greater customizability, but also its drawbacks like we see here. You have to manually stop the camera session when needed in every case or else, even assuming you’re not actively doing anything with the camera, it’s still sitting there quietly processing camera data (and wasting battery!) for no reason. There’s really no good system-level solution for this that also handles developers’ customization needs.
This is just a matter of sloppy code, though, and Instagram’s developers have probably already isolated the code path(s) that caused the camera session not to be stopped when expected with a fix in the works. I can tell you that I haven’t been able to reproduce it yet.
It sounds like soemthing like that could very well be the case here.
That said, it seems that how and when the notification shows up shouldn't really be something that an app controls, but is basically just an OS/hardware level functionality similar to how it works on a Mac.
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No idea what you're going on about. I just think it's good Apple is implementing these and bringing it to our attention. Things like spying our clipboard data and now seeing the camera always being on in certain apps ... both of which big companies are responding with "oops ... it's a bug ... we'll fix it."
It's a start ... and it's better than nothing.
It could be done already if Apple made iMessage an open standard as they promised. They could more actively build on it, adding features and turn it into something crucial and powerful like WeChat in China.This is getting ridiculous. Apple and Google should team up to Sherlock Facebook. Build in all the social features inside of iOS and Android, compatible with one another and make it so that users have no reason to go outside of their phones native features to get what they get out of Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp.
How Apple can help kill Facebook
Facebook has grown very problematic in recent years, having gone from a benign friends aggregator to a monolith literally capable of destroying democracy as we know it. My intention for this thread isn't to politicize the topic. After all, whether you're conservative or liberal, we all value...forums.macrumors.com
I wish Apple would actually do more such things, which could really improve users lives, rather than spending their efforts on TV entertainment and new emojis.
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Oh, the app doesn’t control it. Apologies, I misread what you were saying. The indicator appears any time the app has a session active for the camera and/or microphone. The app controls when such sessions are active, but whether the indicator is shown is otherwise out of the app’s hands. It shows up even if the status bar is hidden in a given app.
Don’t know why would anyone would downvote or disagree with your statement. “Aggressive” notification is definitely the wrong word for describing the action of telling the user that an application is getting access to the camera, microphone, clipboard, etc... especially when done without consent.
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Agreed, but it’s also a necessary evil of sorts?
I very rarely use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc (they even have to reinstall sometimes when opening a link) and not everybody will welcome the stance “I don’t open Facebook links, find another way to show me the reference”.
I think the best we can do is maybe understand the sneakiness when used in these few instances... for example, the clipboard, camera, etc access can it happen even when the application is closed? To what extent can we block or put the minimum necessary for navigating around.
Regarding the account, agreed too, for these I’ll just create a burn account I guess.