
Facebook Accused of Watching Instagram Users Through Cameras - drewem
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-18/facebook-accused-of-watching-instagram-users-through-cameras
======
can16358p
Don't want to be the devil's advocate here but just because camera is on
doesn't mean anything is being recorded. As an iOS developer who worked with
apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX
optimization. Starting the camera takes a brief few hundred milliseconds which
is easily noticable from a user perspective. By keeping the camera ready, they
are making the experience smoother. I think this is it. Just because Facebook
is an evil company doesn't mean this directly is a malicious move.

~~~
rbg246
So you are saying..

A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much
better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup
time'

Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here

Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera
on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.

Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of
reputational damage there.

And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong
idea?

~~~
koonsolo
I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more
like this:

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system
to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the
camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about
that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about
this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

~~~
diffsensitivity
That’s how the explicit narrative goes.

The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a
different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.

Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to
“experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a
gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a
camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper
is.

~~~
mopierotti
Camera start up time actually is quite important in my opinion. For example, I
stopped using snapchat primarily because it felt laggy to get the camera open.
That really grates on you when an app is mostly used for spontaneous
image/video capture.

------
emsy
Let’s assume for a moment the story turns out to be true: would people stop
using Instagram because of it?looking at the history of privacy violations and
the market’s responds to it I doubt it. There is a minority of users who will
feel rightfully violated in their privacy (imagine browsing instagram naked
while possibly being ogled at by some creep at FB). The worst that will happen
is that FB will be sanctioned to pay a laughably low fine. I think we need
much harsher repercussions against these practices, up to barring them
completely from operating.

~~~
devit
A lot of people would probably deny camera permissions to Instagram (and
upload by sharing from gallery if they upload content), and their reputation
would take a significant hit (currently they aren't known to covertly gather
any personal data beyond generic OS-provided statistics).

Also Instagram isn't really essential to communicate and learn about events in
the way the main Facebook service is, so stopping to use it is highly
feasible.

~~~
robbintt
Agreed. I just checked my setting and apparently did this "deny and post from
camera roll" by default. I have no doubt I was just making a privacy conscious
choice.

------
zupreme
This is why iOS is badly in need of a “Task Manager” and of an “Event Viewer”,
so that users may easily audit what resources each app is currently accessing,
and which resources they have accessed in the past, including logging each
instance of camera or microphone use by any app.

Apple has the power to easily mitigate these concerns - yet they do not.

Why?

~~~
loriverkutya
Because my mother is using an iphone and nothing you described would make
sense for her.

She is pretty good with tech and understands how computers and phones work,
but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is
using the camera.

~~~
userbinator
_but she just does not want to browse a process list to see which process is
using the camera._

How do you know until you've tried?

At the risk of provoking a tangential discussion, I don't think keeping users
"in the dark" about what's happening is ever a good idea. They don't have to
learn if they really don't want to, but deliberate opaqueness is bad --- if
anything, it only leads to more learned helplessness and ignorance. Of course,
that's probably what companies want in general, since it means they can
control users more easily...

~~~
soylentcola
Additionally, even if the main user of the device will never pull up a task
manager or usage log, that info can be useful for a friend, relative, or hired
technician who is trying to help them figure out what's going on with their
device.

Instead we have to explain to people that their photos aren't "in" the photos
app and their music isn't "in" iTunes. It's the thing you mentioned: file
managers will just confuse people so let's not include one. Easier to have
them think of files as "living" in the apps we assign to open them.

------
numpad0
Being lawful-evil person I am, I once imagined a “news” app such that display
content or suggestion ever so unnoticeably slightly change depending on how
user behaves judged by device camera.

A facial expression ML model would be trained beforehand so camera data would
not have to be collected, but only pushed to users along app updates, and
content would be analyzed and encoded at server side to determine what users
are to feel, along with hints to aid learning and correlation between
different stories, all subconsciously and automatically.

As for what to do with a system like that...I don’t know, make boatloads of
cash by forcing in-app purchases? Push your favorite but little known novels
and comics? Make group of people I like by my specifications? Promote good
posture, regular exercises and force people to look up? I wouldn’t want to use
it so specific elected officials pass or resign, or world’s atrocities to
become accepted...

Then I got bored. But could it have been something like this?

~~~
SkyMarshal
I wonder if people make distinct enough facial expressions while reading
online content for this to work. For myself, I pretty much stare blankly at
the screen the whole time without much change in my expression. The ML would
have to be very good at detecting slight nuance.

~~~
hairofadog
To your point, one of the things I worry about with apple news, for example,
is that the underlying ai won’t understand _why_ I dislike a particular news
story. Generally I downvote hyperbole, clickbait, and paparazzi content, but I
would guess it’s more common for people to downvote things based on the
substance of a story, e.g. downvoting a well-written, truthful article because
the truth in that case is inconvenient for their political stance, or because
it’s about a loathsome-yet-newsworthy person. A facial recognition system
would have to know the difference between my face being frustrated at a high-
quality story about the fires in the western states vs my frustration that
apple news seems to find Andy Borowitz to be hilarious and relevant. Maybe
possible, but lots of nuance under the surface.

------
andreareina
[https://archive.is/uCMN9](https://archive.is/uCMN9)

~~~
samoa42
much appreciated

------
swiley
Is the main reason the app store still has public support this belief that
apple instruments the apps it reviews? Because it looks like they don't. If
that's the case it's trivially easy to get malware on the iphone and the only
thing the app store really does is give Apple power.

~~~
mantap
This is well known among iOS developers. Apple's approval process is far too
cursory to catch malware. Also a lot of crapware gets through. The best you
can say about it is that it filters out the really obvious stuff.

~~~
kennywinker
And provides a mechanism for pulling bad apps when they’re later found to be
bad.

------
CGamesPlay
Is this the same scandal from before: where the app had the camera on because
when you swipe to record a story they wanted it to be instantly available? Did
it just take a while to reach lawsuit status or is this about some new thing?

~~~
Zenbit_UX
One of us would have had to write this code, a PM would have had to authorize
and break it down, a UX designer might have had to design its internal
dashboard for "how to perv on users most efficiently" including flows and user
stories, and then that code would have had to be pushed to the Instagram git
repo which surely has some ~hundred devs on it that saw it go in, or may
notice it at some time in the future.

Now I know it takes a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance to work for
facebook in this day and age but the main reason this doesn't seem likely to
me is that that's way too many people involved in something beyond shady (even
for Facebook) for this to not get out. There's even a
[formula]([https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905))
to calculate how likely it is for a conspiracy to remain a secret depending on
the number of people involved.

~~~
lalos
Multiple (horrible) events through history can provide the insight that as
long as you partition each task enough, people will happily work and
contribute to a horrible end goal and later claim they were only following
orders and had no idea of the side effects of their individual actions.

------
antpls
I suspected for a long time that they are doing the same on Android.

There must be a very small mechanical part in my phone's camera (probably the
lens when it focuses) that makes a subtle noise when activated. I noticed the
noise was present every few minutes when I browsed on Instagram, but only when
I forgot to turn off camera permission.

It is creepy, no matter what the reason behind this.

~~~
what_ever
Wouldn't this be easy to verify on those phones where the front camera pops
outside when being used?
[https://www.vivo.com/in/products/v15pro](https://www.vivo.com/in/products/v15pro)

------
pmlnr
"oh, it's a bug" \- so make them financially and legally responsible for bugs.
Just like automotive is.

~~~
jml7c5
You generally need to show damages for liability.

------
paxys
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word)

------
jtjones
I personally do not accept app camera permissions for any app that I don't
fully trust. I stopped trusting the Facebook app years ago when it launched
itself constantly in the background.

------
parliament32
On a side note, IG works perfectly fine being denied the Camera permission. In
fact, it doesn't even complain about it until you try to take a picture in-
app... and most users' workflow is taking pics with their phone's camera app
(which is almost always better than IG's) and uploading the actual files to IG
(you can still apply filters and everything else this way).

~~~
angel_j
It doesn't need access to your photo library either. Imagine giving access to
your whole roll!

~~~
kennywinker
If you want to post, it needs access to your photo library or the camera. If
you want to post stories, it needs access to the camera and microphone.

~~~
angel_j
nah you pick a photo and select "share" then select insta

------
tonywastaken
I noticed this yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505285](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505285)

Facebook got caught on this one- but there are probably hundreds of Apple
internal APIs that they are using to violate people's privacy.

------
_trampeltier
Lately was also this thing, with App check always our clipboard. I wonder how
many website does the same, and also check your clipboard all the time. And
with more and more APIs in browsers, I wonder how many website start to listen
and watch you.

~~~
rickyc091
Not even websites. Desktop apps also have access to your clipboard without any
permissions. Can't wait until it becomes more common practice to provide an
audit trail of any apps snooping on the clipboard.

------
trident1000
Kind of absurd there is not a physical camera close feature on phones at this
point.

------
amelius
Why isn't the user better protected by the OS from these kinds of
malpractices?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
This is starting to happen. E.g.:

 _New iOS 14 feature warns you if someone is spying on you through your
iPhone: Look out for the orange dot at the top of your screen_

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8744423/iOS-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8744423/iOS-14-update-
displays-orange-dot-warn-listening-in.html)

~~~
antegamisou
This is the exact same thing as the red microphone banner popping up at the
top left in all previous iOS versions.

Also, strongly reconsider citing tabloids as accurate - reliable news' source,
especially when it comes to tech.

------
jjbinx007
Even if this was true, which I doubt, what would Facebook actually gain by
doing this? They'd see a person's face from an unflattering angle with an
unflattering expression.

Or they'd see whatever the front camera sees at the time, which in my case
right now is the back of my phone case or possibly the floor.

I don't see that as valuable data to mine.

~~~
washadjeffmad
They'd be able to track what your eyes focused on and for how long, whether
you wore glasses, were bald, your approximate age and ethnicity, whether you
have facial hair, your reactions to content, and a lot of other behaviors and
metrics that would never cross your mind.

Instagram already does all of the above, but so does a lot of digital signage
in shopping districts, in addition to tracking your BT HWID, to monitor trends
in real time. Then they sell this info to eg- financial companies that operate
things like mutual funds.

That's what I was doing with mine in the mid-2000s, anyway.

~~~
skocznymroczny
> your reactions to content

do you actually "react" to content? Like chuckle or make any other facial
expressions? I just scroll and scroll and scroll with a neutral expression.

~~~
washadjeffmad
Yes. Have you ever used one of those face swap filters that turns you into a
funny character that mimics your facial expressions?

Well, how does it know?

A mirth-filled squint of the eyes, dilation of pupils at something unexpected,
a tightening of the mouth signalling ennui, the movements that accompany a
brief nasal exhalation at something on the nose to your taste in humor... all
add to something.

You're not as implacable as you think.

------
noisy_boy
With the VR/AR initiatives they have, people will voluntarily share what they
are looking at. Make sharing information integral part of the experience and
you get everything without any wrongdoing.

------
dangus
This kind of thing makes me glad that we’ve got the mic/camera indicator dots
in iOS 14, along with the clipboard paste notifications.

------
natch
I wonder how unfettered Mark’s access is to all their data and systems. The
answer to this question should be public in order to bolster trust, but as far
as I know it is not.

More on topic, I doubt this particular feature is nefarious, but those who
would spy often seem to rely on others’ doubt that it is happening.

------
august125
Mark Zuckerberg has completed his transformation into a real life Artie Ziff.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9X3tvTmIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9X3tvTmIQ)

~~~
jessaustin
Your comparison is apt, but for a moment I confused this character with that
of Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Villains with a "Z"!

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Conditi will have a hard time proving it wasn't a bug and the data was
actually being used in the way she describes it.

~~~
mtgx
This thing where Facebook collects a lot of data in ways to which most people
would object for years and years, and then when they get caught they claim it
was a "bug", is getting really old.

To make matters worse, they usually tend to re-introduce the "bug" as some
kind of feature a few years later, as their way of saying "yes, we really do
thing our users are that stupid to not realize what we've done, why do you
ask?!"

~~~
bitL
Google started it with the WiFi collection "bug" and offline location
collection "bug".

------
mgoetzke
did ios14 not add something like a monitoring for this ?

------
rvz
Call it for what it is. Complete Malware. Plain and simple fact.

------
Hokusai
Why physical sliding covers are not mandatory? This happens again and again.
And, everybody has several cameras at home.

A part of that, Facebook still is responsible for their actions.

