Someone is suing Facebook. What a novelty, right? Well, wait to see why, because this could interest you. Everything is related to the latest update of iOS 14 , which added a new function to know when the camera is being used on the phone.
Is Facebook spying on users?
Associating Facebook with spying is somewhat sarcastic, but a new lawsuit filed claims that the company has been spying on Instagram users without their consent through the phone’s camera. The lawsuit comes in mid-July, when a beta of iOS 14 easily reveals which application is using the device’s camera, either directly or in the background.
This new function allows the user to know when the iPhone camera is being used, so that, if it is running in the background, the user can know at all times if it is active. Well, that’s just what happened with Instagram, since the application seemed to be using the camera when the user was simply checking the feed.
That is, by simply browsing the photos of your contacts or the explore tab, Instagram activated the green dot on the iOS screen, which meant that the camera was being used at that precise moment. Since when has Instagram been activating the camera?
The problem of a supposed bug
That Instagram activates the camera without the user’s consent is a very serious mistake, since, if so, the user’s privacy would end up completely nullified. According to Instagram, the notification of the activation of the camera is a bug that appears due to the Create Mode function, which is nothing more than the shortcut that we can activate by side scrolling to the right.
By making this gesture, we enter the mode of creating stories and quick publications, so the software seems to have an error that apparently keeps the camera on at all times.
But this reason does not seem to be enough for Brittany Conditi, as she has filed a lawsuit against. Facebook in federal court in San Francisco, alleging that the company intends to collect “lucrative and valuable data about its users that it would not otherwise have access to.”
Facebook prefers not to speak
Meanwhile, the parent company, Facebook, has preferred not to get into the rag, and for now remains completely on the sidelines of what happened. We will see how this all ends and if they can justify the reason why the camera was activated involuntarily.
