The Facebook app on iOS appears to be activating the phone camera in the background of the app in some situations without the user’s knowledge. The attention of Facebook’s management team has been brought to this and they now claim they’ll be submitting a fix to address these issues to Apple.
We all know Facebook is a huge organization, meaning they must have some of the world’s best developers in their workforce. One would ask, is it possible that an issue this sensitive escaped their notice after series of tests or this is just another ploy to spy on people. We’ll let you choose your answer.
There are a couple of ways that this has been found to happen. One person found that the camera UI for Facebook Stories briefly appeared behind a video when they flipped their phone from portrait to landscape. Then, when they flipped it back, the app opened directly to the Stories camera. You can see it in action here (via CNET):
Today, while watching a video on @facebook, I rotated to landscape and could see the Facebook/Instagram Story UI for a split second. When rotating back to portrait, the Story camera/UI opened entirely. A little worrying… pic.twitter.com/7lVHHGedGf
— Neo QA (@neo_qa) November 2, 2019
It was also reported that when you view a photo on the app and just barely drag it down, it’s possible to see an active camera viewfinder on the left side of the screen, as shown in a tweet by web designer Joshua Maddux:
Found a @facebook #security & #privacy issue. When the app is open it actively uses the camera. I found a bug in the app that lets you see the camera open behind your feed. Note that I had the camera pointed at the carpet. pic.twitter.com/B8b9oE1nbl
— Joshua Maddux (@JoshuaMaddux) November 10, 2019
Maddux says he could reproduce the issue across five different iPhones, which were all apparently running iOS 13.2.2, but he reportedly couldn’t reproduce it on iPhones running iOS 12.
Facebook, in a statement said that this second issue is due to a bug that was inadvertently introduced in an app update released on November 8th and that it’ll be submitting a fix to Apple. The company also tells us that “we have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug.” Additionally, the company said that the first issue identified in this article will be addressed by the fix submitted to Apple as well.
Even though it seems like these issues will be fixed, the fact that users could unexpectedly see the camera viewfinder in the app at all isn’t a good thing. People already worry about the myth that Facebook is listening in to our conversations. A hidden camera viewfinder in its app, even if it was purely accidental, might stoke fears that the company is secretly recording everything we do. And as you wait for a potential fix to roll out, you might want to revoke the Facebook app’s camera access, just to be safe.
