
Instagram promises to fix bug after always accessing the camera on iOS 14 - electic
https://9to5mac.com/2020/07/25/instagram-promises-to-fix-bug-after-being-exposed-by-always-accessing-the-camera-on-ios-14/
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kirillzubovsky
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.

~~~
dpacmittal
At this point, does Facebook really deserve benefit of the doubt?

~~~
ignoramous
> _At this point, does Facebook really deserve benefit of the doubt?_

You have a point: _Facebook is using the iPhone’s camera as users scroll their
feed_ ,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513471)

~~~
temporary12345
It is layout bug, as explained, but who cares rights? Let’s just throw stones
and without a shadow of a doubt attribute it to malicious intent.

~~~
ignoramous
Fool me once...

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addicted
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.

~~~
mgraczyk
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.

~~~
addicted
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
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.

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tareqak
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
> 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.

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

~~~
WilTimSon
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.

~~~
simonbarker87
Don’t put down to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

It’s generally a happier way to live and view the world.

~~~
markdown
These are among the top app developers in the world you're talking about.
Instagram isn't a todo list or torch app made by a 12yr old in their bedroom.
Incompetence doesn't come into it.

~~~
kalleboo
Facebook's app engineering is absolutely insane, there's no way an app
engineering methodology that creates _18,000 classes_ is going to be end up
being bug-free [https://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-
earth-t...](https://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-the-
facebook-ios-application-is-so)

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perryizgr8
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
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
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.

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throwaway8463
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
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
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).

------
AVTizzle
Instagram*

*by Facebook

~~~
bergstromm466
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
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
How do you know that they aren't heavily integrated? How do you define an app,
where are the boundaries?

~~~
thundermuffin
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
> 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
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.

------
mgraczyk
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
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
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.

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

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saagarjha
The first beta for iOS 14 was released on June 22.

~~~
karxxm
Yeah exactly. I thought people would directly check all the Facebook apps for
privacy concerns

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

~~~
spoopyskelly
Instagram isn't owned by a foreign adversary that wants to destroy your
economy, so there isn't any campaign.

~~~
dylan604
No, but it is owned by FB who wants to own your economy

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

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

~~~
coronadisaster
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.

