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Instagram promises to fix bug after always accessing the camera on iOS 14

202 points by electic 6y ago

AVTizzle 6y ago
Instagram* *by Facebook
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  This is fucking important. I think it's deceiving to refer to different child companies as if they are separate entities, instead of refering to the mother entity. It only benefits the corporation when this happens, not customers. I'd even call it Doublespeak or a PR strategy. Divide and conquer. The illusion of choice. Monopoly is the name of the game. "Competition is for losers." — Peter Thiel
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    Except we’re not talking about companies, we are talking about the actual app in question. The app is called instagram and it is separate from another app called Facebook by the same company.
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      How do you know that they aren't heavily integrated? How do you define an app, where are the boundaries?
      - thundermuffin 6y ago
        In my opinion, a great place to define that boundary is when you have to move to a completely separate app; unless something's majorly changed recently, you can't access the majority of Facebook or Instagram from the other app unless you end up in a WebView and login that way. At that point, you aren't using a native experience where they have the same level of access that they do from the actual app and the main issue about having the camera open isn't even relevant anymore, haha. 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.
        bergstromm466 6y ago
        > a pretty gnarly bug in GMail 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.
        thundermuffin 6y ago
        I actually agreed with you that the way Facebook and other companies abuse their acquired / spun off companies and toss them aside when it gets heated is wrong, and that it definitely has an impact on the entire tech ecosystem, including just consumers of tech; originally, you asked how you could separate apps from each other, and the only reason I included the statement about GMail was to give more insight on how I viewed the topic, but it looks like it didn't matter since only six words of my response is what you took away. 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.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - annadane 6y ago
    I fail to see why this is downvoted. Completely agree.
perryizgr8 6y ago
I think they do it so it is quicker to show the viewfinder when you go to the photo mode. I think Snapchat does the same.
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  Not sure if Snapchat has changed recently (I haven't used it in a long time) but before, Snapchat's first screen on launch was the camera viewfinder.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Yes that was indeed the case, but the twist is that even if you scrolled to the side views, the camera would still remain active. They actually had (still have?) a low power mode toggle in the settings that I believe deactivated this behavior.
jchonphoenix 6y ago
This title is editorialized. The article confirms that this was due to a bug in iOS and is not Instagram's fault.
- WilTimSon 6y ago
  Interesting to see the difference in perspectives: Reddit is jumping on that quote about it being a bug and saying it's definitely intentional, while HN is taking a more conservative approach. Personally, I always err on the side of bug/incompetence rather than maliciousness in matters like this because even Facebook isn't brazen enough to pull something this obvious.
  - jchonphoenix 6y ago
    I think the key here is that it's a bug in iOS, not in Instagram. So FB isn't even the responsible party. Additionally, it's a beta version of iOS, so we're supposed to be expecting bugs anyway.
    - spsful 6y ago
      Almost funny to see that people are taking a feature from an unreleased, beta version of iOS as certain proof that companies are acting mischievous.
      - JaimeThompson 6y ago
        To be fair given the Facebook family of applications history in regards to gathering information from every source possible there isn't much reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
      - detaro 6y ago
        Even more funny (or sad?) is people reading an article with a headline saying it's Instagram, clearly quoting Instagram as saying they'll fix the bug, and then claim Apple is at fault, despite nothing in the article suggesting that.
kirillzubovsky 6y ago
As someone who has done a little bit of iOS development for fun, I wouldn't be surprised if this is an actual bug. There used to be 10 different ways to do the same thing inside iOS, and neither one was "correct." 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.
- usefulcat 6y ago
  > Unlikely to take on such a massive intrusion of your privacy, knowing that eventually it would get discovered. 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).
- yumraj 6y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if this is an actual bug. 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.
  - temporary12345 6y ago
    > complete disregard 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.
karxxm 6y ago
The Beta for ios 14 is out there for how long? And this is only now being noticed?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  The first beta for iOS 14 was released on June 22.
  - karxxm 6y ago
    Yeah exactly. I thought people would directly check all the Facebook apps for privacy concerns
iRobbery 6y ago
Wouldn't everybody notice their battery draining? The article doesn't mention this.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  sometimes my battery start draining a lot faster and my phone becomes really hot while I'm not doing anything special... not sure what is causing it yet.
addicted 6y ago
My wife, on me telling her about this, pointed the most obvious way Instagram could be using this, without storing, recording, or transmitting anything. 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.
- draw_down 6y ago
  Come on
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  If only battery life/processing/machine learning were that good. It's possible companies would do things like this if were technically feasible, but we're a long way away (I work on camera ML at IG). The correct answer to what is going on is Facebook's official response in the article.
  - notnap 6y ago
    Battery life always takes a dive when you have Fb apps installed, including Instagram.
  - addicted 6y ago
    Do Instagram filters destroy battery life? 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.
    - CardenB 6y ago
      Can you link to me a project hat does facial sentiment analysis in an efficient way? Actually curious if it’s possible to do this without hurting battery life much.
  - 6y ago
alfiedotwtf 6y ago
Where’s the national campaign to dump Instagram like there is Tik Tok?
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  Instagram isn't owned by a foreign adversary that wants to destroy your economy, so there isn't any campaign.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    No, but it is owned by FB who wants to own your economy
  - rydre 6y ago
    Robots are foreign adversaries.
mgraczyk 6y ago
For those commenting that IG may be secretly and nefariously using data from the camera for business purposes; IG has a "download your data tool". It includes all the of your data that IG stores. Spoiler Alert: silently-recorded feeds from your camera are not in that dump.
- marketneutral 6y ago
  The fact that the suspected secret data is not in the public “download your data” tool is not really an argument that it doesn’t exist.
  - dencodev 6y ago
    Agreed, and I think this is obvious. Facebook probably has a thousand metrics of how long you spend looking at things, what you tend to look at, how likely you are to look at something different. None of this is downloadable.
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  Does this data dump include the metadata for the data transfers made to the NSA?
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Uh huh. Sure it does. And who is auditing that?
  - mgraczyk 6y ago
    The FTC
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Just like Facebook's "download your data" tool used to not include the companies that shared information about you... until they decided to make this public (and provide a UI to see it) and then suddenly it appeared in the data dump. 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).
tareqak 6y ago
Can we please talk about the elephant in the room? 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?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > Given the competitive nature of recruiting and employment at Facebook 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.
throwaway8463 6y ago
For a while already I have been noticing the red "screen recording" bar on top of the screen appearing and quickly going away at random moments while Instagram is open (since iOS 13 at least). Seems to happen usually while I'm browsing photo library and/or post drafts. 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.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I doubt it's screen recording; as far as I know no third-party app can record the screen and even if they could there's easier ways to collect analytics than record a huge video which you then need to upload & process. I'm pretty sure the red bar also appears when an app is using the microphone in the background, which would be more likely in this case.
  - throwaway8463 6y ago
    The icon showing up is the double circle one, not the mic. 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).
blackrock 6y ago
What? The iPhone’s front camera is always on? Are they taking regular video snapshots of you in the background?

202 points by electic 6y ago

AVTizzle 6y ago

Instagram* *by Facebook

bergstromm466 6y ago
This is fucking important. I think it's deceiving to refer to different child companies as if they are separate entities, instead of refering to the mother entity. It only benefits the corporation when this happens, not customers. I'd even call it Doublespeak or a PR strategy. Divide and conquer. The illusion of choice. Monopoly is the name of the game. "Competition is for losers." — Peter Thiel
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Except we’re not talking about companies, we are talking about the actual app in question. The app is called instagram and it is separate from another app called Facebook by the same company.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    How do you know that they aren't heavily integrated? How do you define an app, where are the boundaries?
    - thundermuffin 6y ago
      In my opinion, a great place to define that boundary is when you have to move to a completely separate app; unless something's majorly changed recently, you can't access the majority of Facebook or Instagram from the other app unless you end up in a WebView and login that way. At that point, you aren't using a native experience where they have the same level of access that they do from the actual app and the main issue about having the camera open isn't even relevant anymore, haha. 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.
      - bergstromm466 6y ago
        > a pretty gnarly bug in GMail 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.
        thundermuffin 6y ago
        I actually agreed with you that the way Facebook and other companies abuse their acquired / spun off companies and toss them aside when it gets heated is wrong, and that it definitely has an impact on the entire tech ecosystem, including just consumers of tech; originally, you asked how you could separate apps from each other, and the only reason I included the statement about GMail was to give more insight on how I viewed the topic, but it looks like it didn't matter since only six words of my response is what you took away. 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.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- annadane 6y ago
  I fail to see why this is downvoted. Completely agree.

perryizgr8 6y ago

I think they do it so it is quicker to show the viewfinder when you go to the photo mode. I think Snapchat does the same.

blisseyGo 6y ago
Not sure if Snapchat has changed recently (I haven't used it in a long time) but before, Snapchat's first screen on launch was the camera viewfinder.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Yes that was indeed the case, but the twist is that even if you scrolled to the side views, the camera would still remain active. They actually had (still have?) a low power mode toggle in the settings that I believe deactivated this behavior.

jchonphoenix 6y ago

This title is editorialized. The article confirms that this was due to a bug in iOS and is not Instagram's fault.

WilTimSon 6y ago
Interesting to see the difference in perspectives: Reddit is jumping on that quote about it being a bug and saying it's definitely intentional, while HN is taking a more conservative approach. Personally, I always err on the side of bug/incompetence rather than maliciousness in matters like this because even Facebook isn't brazen enough to pull something this obvious.
- jchonphoenix 6y ago
  I think the key here is that it's a bug in iOS, not in Instagram. So FB isn't even the responsible party. Additionally, it's a beta version of iOS, so we're supposed to be expecting bugs anyway.
  - spsful 6y ago
    Almost funny to see that people are taking a feature from an unreleased, beta version of iOS as certain proof that companies are acting mischievous.
    - JaimeThompson 6y ago
      To be fair given the Facebook family of applications history in regards to gathering information from every source possible there isn't much reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Even more funny (or sad?) is people reading an article with a headline saying it's Instagram, clearly quoting Instagram as saying they'll fix the bug, and then claim Apple is at fault, despite nothing in the article suggesting that.

kirillzubovsky 6y ago

As someone who has done a little bit of iOS development for fun, I wouldn't be surprised if this is an actual bug. There used to be 10 different ways to do the same thing inside iOS, and neither one was "correct." 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.

usefulcat 6y ago
> Unlikely to take on such a massive intrusion of your privacy, knowing that eventually it would get discovered. 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).
yumraj 6y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if this is an actual bug. 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.
- temporary12345 6y ago
  > complete disregard 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.

karxxm 6y ago

The Beta for ios 14 is out there for how long? And this is only now being noticed?

saagarjha 6y ago
The first beta for iOS 14 was released on June 22.
- karxxm 6y ago
  Yeah exactly. I thought people would directly check all the Facebook apps for privacy concerns

iRobbery 6y ago

Wouldn't everybody notice their battery draining? The article doesn't mention this.

coronadisaster 6y ago
sometimes my battery start draining a lot faster and my phone becomes really hot while I'm not doing anything special... not sure what is causing it yet.

addicted 6y ago

My wife, on me telling her about this, pointed the most obvious way Instagram could be using this, without storing, recording, or transmitting anything. 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.

draw_down 6y ago
Come on
mgraczyk 6y ago
If only battery life/processing/machine learning were that good. It's possible companies would do things like this if were technically feasible, but we're a long way away (I work on camera ML at IG). The correct answer to what is going on is Facebook's official response in the article.
- notnap 6y ago
  Battery life always takes a dive when you have Fb apps installed, including Instagram.
- addicted 6y ago
  Do Instagram filters destroy battery life? 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.
  - CardenB 6y ago
    Can you link to me a project hat does facial sentiment analysis in an efficient way? Actually curious if it’s possible to do this without hurting battery life much.
- 6y ago

alfiedotwtf 6y ago

Where’s the national campaign to dump Instagram like there is Tik Tok?

spoopyskelly 6y ago
Instagram isn't owned by a foreign adversary that wants to destroy your economy, so there isn't any campaign.
- dylan604 6y ago
  No, but it is owned by FB who wants to own your economy
- rydre 6y ago
  Robots are foreign adversaries.

mgraczyk 6y ago

For those commenting that IG may be secretly and nefariously using data from the camera for business purposes; IG has a "download your data tool". It includes all the of your data that IG stores. Spoiler Alert: silently-recorded feeds from your camera are not in that dump.

marketneutral 6y ago
The fact that the suspected secret data is not in the public “download your data” tool is not really an argument that it doesn’t exist.
- dencodev 6y ago
  Agreed, and I think this is obvious. Facebook probably has a thousand metrics of how long you spend looking at things, what you tend to look at, how likely you are to look at something different. None of this is downloadable.
coronadisaster 6y ago
Does this data dump include the metadata for the data transfers made to the NSA?
cwhiz 6y ago
Uh huh. Sure it does. And who is auditing that?
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  The FTC
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Nextgrid 6y ago
Just like Facebook's "download your data" tool used to not include the companies that shared information about you... until they decided to make this public (and provide a UI to see it) and then suddenly it appeared in the data dump. 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).

tareqak 6y ago

Can we please talk about the elephant in the room? 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?

Nextgrid 6y ago
> Given the competitive nature of recruiting and employment at Facebook 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.

throwaway8463 6y ago

For a while already I have been noticing the red "screen recording" bar on top of the screen appearing and quickly going away at random moments while Instagram is open (since iOS 13 at least). Seems to happen usually while I'm browsing photo library and/or post drafts. 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.

Nextgrid 6y ago
I doubt it's screen recording; as far as I know no third-party app can record the screen and even if they could there's easier ways to collect analytics than record a huge video which you then need to upload & process. I'm pretty sure the red bar also appears when an app is using the microphone in the background, which would be more likely in this case.
- throwaway8463 6y ago
  The icon showing up is the double circle one, not the mic. 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).

blackrock 6y ago

What? The iPhone’s front camera is always on? Are they taking regular video snapshots of you in the background?