Is Facebook Secretly Accessing Your iPhone’s Camera? Some Users Claimed

Reportedly, multiple iPhone users have come forward on social
media complaining that the Facebook app secretly activates their
smartphone’s camera in the background while they scroll through
their Facebook feeds or looking at the photos on the social
network.

As shown in the video below, when users click on an image or
video on the social media to full screen and then return it back to
normal, an issue with the Facebook app for iOS slightly shifts the
app to the right.

It opens a space on the left from where users can see the
iPhone’s camera activated in the background.

However, at this moment, it’s not clear if it’s just an UI bug
where Facebook app only accesses the camera interface, or it also
uses it to record or upload videos, which, if proven right, would
be the most disastrous moment in Facebook’s history.

The privacy issue immediately got the attention of other
Facebook for iOS users, many of them tried reproducing the issue
but failed, which likely suggests the buggy software update has not
been rolled out to everyone worldwide and might affect a fraction
of Facebook users only.

The Hacker News was also not independently able to reproduce the
bug and, thus, can not verify the authenticity of it.

Joshua Maddux, one of the users who discovered this bug, claimed
that he tested and was able to replicate it on at least 5 different
iPhones running iOS 13.2.2, which is the latest iOS version.

“I will note that iPhones running iOS 12 don’t show the camera
but not to say that it’s not being used,” Maddux said.

Some users also tested the issue after revoking camera
permissions from Facebook, and they found that the background space
was just a black screen in that case.

The news came less than a week after Facebook admitted that
roughly 100 app developers might have improperly accessed
its users’ data^[6]
in certain Facebook groups, including their names and profile
pictures.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information, and if we
hear back from them, we’ll update this post.