| > turns 10 this year. It runs the latest compatible version of Cyanogenmod. Despite the obvious security drawbacks Anecdote: 6 months ago I got a OnePlus 7 Pro and installed LineageOS (continuation of CyanogenMod) on it. The 7 Pro has very small screen borders and no notch (iPhone) / punch hole (Samsung); instead a motor makes the selfie camera pop up & retract from the top of the phone. I also never updated LineageOS because it went from an unofficial build to officially supported so updating would require a complete reset. About two months ago I noticed that the camera would pop up every once in a while for seemingly no reason. I could only conclude that it was hacked; worse, I would have never noticed on a 'normal' phone without a pop-up camera. Was my phone also recording me the entire time? I don't know what the vulnerability was - it could have been a remote exploit in Android itself that's also exploitable on your phone, or it could have been from an app that I had installed (the only apps I had with network usage + camera permissions were Firefox, and the latest version of WhatsApp from when I bought the phone (no updates since I don't have Google software on it, I just downloaded the WhatsApp APK when I set it up)). You've said that you don't have any sensitive data on your phone, but still be careful. I updated LineageOS and since then the issue has disappeared. I update the OS about every week now to hopefully prevent this from happening again. |
That seems like a bit of a leap. Isn't it more likely to have been a software glitch of some sort?