Lawsuit Accuses Facebook of Spying on Instagram Users with Their Cameras

[Cathoholic]

Lawsuit Accuses Facebook of Spying on Instagram Users with Their Cameras​

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/Getty

LUCAS NOLAN

19 Sep 2020

Tech giant Facebook has been accused of spying on Instagram users via their mobile phone cameras according to a recently filed lawsuit.

The Verge reports that tech giant Facebook is being accused of spying on users of its Instagram photo-sharing app thought the unauthorized use of users’ mobile phone cameras. The lawsuit comes after media reports in July that Instagram appeared to be accessing iPhone cameras when the app was not being used.

Facebook has denied the reports . . .

. . . Facebook was accused in a separate lawsuit filed last month of using facial-recognition technology to illegally harvest the biometric data of its more than 100 million Instagram users. Facebook has denied the claim . . .

. . . The recently filed case is Conditi v. Instagram, LLC, 20-cv-06534, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

Lawsuit Accuses Facebook of Spying on Instagram Users with Their Cameras

 

[LeafByNiggle]

From the article:
Breitbart:

Facebook has denied the reports and claimed that the issue was caused by a bug which the company said it was fixing. The bug allegedly caused false notifications in iOS 14 that stated that iPhone cameras were being accessed when they weren’t being actively used.

As an iPhone software developer myself, I can say that this sounds legit to me. If those filing the lawsuit hope to make any kind of a case, they will have to show that the Facebook app is doing more than just generating a user notification.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

As an iPhone software developer myself, I can say that this sounds legit to me. If those filing the lawsuit hope to make any kind of a case, they will have to show that the Facebook app is doing more than just generating a user notification.

I saw this earlier today and thought that it might be related to the notices that iOS 14 beta was giving from an app accessing hardware. But an app accessing the hardware doesn’t tell that it is reading data and transmitting it. It would have been nice if they had monitored the flow of data out of the app. I imagine this would not be terribly hard. I’ve done this to iPhone apps from other developers so that I could show management where something was falling.