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
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.
In an effort to extend the lifespan of my 6S I had my battery replaced by Apple January of this year, and iOS lists the battery’s health at 92%.
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.
I think those slow loading times could very well be the flash memory wear, as I seem to remember experiencing that on my nearly-full iPhone 3G way back when towards the end of its life.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
Please explain how, in detail? I tap the message button and it asks for permission to my contacts. I tap deny which only dismisses the permissions request. I don't get a chat field or any way to manually enter a phone number to start chatting.
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.
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.
Not connected to google, WhatsApp sideloaded (though cannot guarantee google doesn’t get a copy...).
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.
It's cleanly installed for the first time on this mobile device.
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.
Apart from the purchased apps, switching is nowadays a no brainier. Android has come so far that in a couple of hours, tops, anyone can switch. It even imports your data from iOS. PS former Apple loyal customer here.
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.
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.
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.
Updates should not degrade the usability of a device. If a device is too slow to run new features then they should be disabled by default. Apple has an obvious incentive to make people disatisfied with their older devices and want to buy the new one so it is fast again.
Current smartphones have sped up an unimaginable amount since the early models. There is no excuse for them to ever be unresponsive, even with the higher resolution screens. There's a difference between 'complexity' and 'bloat', and if they just had less bloat they would win against 'people like that'.
I said disabled by default. Make new but slow features an option. Most people would rather a working phone that isn't super slow over having the latest feature but if they still want it they can turn it on. Its total insanity that apple phones only last a few years before they are too slow.
Part of what makes iOS devices so usable and well-liked is they don't include a massive matrix of configuration options in the settings. Everyone gets a standard configuration, and it works well. If you create hundreds of features you have to test the cross product of all of them separately and together. That's not a realistic way of operating a business.
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.
Apparently it doesn't work well if it takes users multiple seconds to open an app. I have heard many complaints about iphones becoming unusablely slow after a few updates which is unacceptable since much older phones were able to run much more responsively.
Until their batteries degraded and were no longer able to provide sufficient current to operate the device at peak performance. Batteries are consumables. It’s a combination of the never ending march of software bloat and the degraded performance characteristics of the years-old battery due to physics.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Within the app, I don’t believe so. But you can from the website. I use the website mostly for that reason and because when I click on a link, it opens in Safari instead of an embedded web view.
Facebook doesn’t use the SafariViewController that can take advantage of content blockers.
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?
It’s not a “workaround”. It’s the standard concept of “least privilege” you should give any application - don’t give any app more permission than it absolutely needs. It’s one thing that iOS makes easier than any other operating system at the user level.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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