[can16358p]

Don't want to be the devil's advocate here but just because camera is on doesn't mean anything is being recorded. As an iOS developer who worked with apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX optimization. Starting the camera takes a brief few hundred milliseconds which is easily noticable from a user perspective. By keeping the camera ready, they are making the experience smoother. I think this is it. Just because Facebook is an evil company doesn't mean this directly is a malicious move.

[wheybags]

If this was the case, they wouldn't have claimed it was a bug. Besides, big tech companies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

[iRomain]

> Besides, big tech companies have lost the benefit of the doubt.

This is so spot on and pretty much sums up everything that's going on at the moment.

[mtnGoat]

For good reason though, a lot of big tech kind of burned their trust wholesale to increase valuation.

[bagacrap]

Fb* has lost benefit of the doubt.

I don't understand why people read yet another story about FB's bad behavior somehow conclude all of big tech are bad guys. Is it really so hard to keep them straight?

[bearcobra]

I mean, there are plenty of stories about Google, Amazon, Apple behaving in ways that could lead someone to that conclusion. Microsoft has the best reputation to me, but I'm young enough that the EEE days don't hold much resonance.

[reaperducer]

I don't understand why people read yet another story about FB's bad behavior somehow conclude all of big tech are bad guys.

For the same reason that people believe all politicians are evil, and the all lawyers kick puppies into a woodchipper for fun.

It's "otherism." Or to put it in gambling terms: Playing the odds.

[bostik]

It's the 95-5 rule.

95% of a given population ruin the reputation of the remaining 5%.

[daerogami]

That sounds backwards... wouldn't it be 5% ruins the reputation of the remaining 95%?

[danudey]

You would think so, but I think the general consensus is that every SV tech company will do evil in a heartbeat if it will improve adoption, retention, or any other KPI, making privacy-respecting companies the exception, not the rule.

[maxmamis]

Incentives. FB behaves like this because it's profitable for them to do so. Do you expect this sort of behavior is somehow not profitable for other companies of their scale?

[teawrecks]

Because only one of these companies needs to make a mistake before they all should learn from it. It would be like watching every construction company make the same egregious safety error one after the other. The first one to make the mistake is not as guilty as the 10th company to make the mistake after having just watched the previous 9.

[TrainedMonkey]

This could be a disconnect between engineers who wanted to make a smooth experience on all devices and PR manager who does not want anything that could be construed as unethical behavior. IMO if this does affect performance it should probably be an option.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's quite common to characterize intended features which cause unintended problems as "bugs".

[EmilioMartinez]

This. It's a handwavy familiar term (without defending its usage).

Remember that nowadays people call soundless videos "GIFs", browsers curtail web adresses, and companies report leak passwords as being encrypted when they were actually hashed.

[higerordermap]

Tangentially related. Big tech (FB, Google etc..) used to be favourite workplaces for programmers. Now what are the exciting workspaces for engineers considering big tech is doing lot of unethical things?

[haburka]

Everyone will have a different experience - it’s difficult to fathom the scale of how much work is being done at these companies from the outside.

Consumers often have the mistaken assumption that they know what a large tech company is basically doing. In reality, there are thousands of projects, most of which you’ll never hear about.

In my experience people are more affected by their manager and working group than the company clashing with their ideals.

[jtsiskin]

They are still the exciting workplaces.

If you are passionate about privacy, I believe one of the best things you could do in practice is is join a big tech co and work on E2E encryption, security, privacy controls, homomorphic encryption, etc. Change is easier from within

[tchalla]

> As an iOS developer who worked with apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX optimization.

Here's what Facebook does once you give access to the iOS Photos app. Every time you open the Facebook app, it asks you - "Would you like to post these photos on Facebook?". Basically, they are reading the Photos library repeatedly to scan for recent (or past) photos along with their meta data. It could be just UX optimisation. It could also be UX optimisation for harvesting data.

[izacus]

Or, more likely, it's an engagement optimization to have people post more photos and keep those metrics up.

These bizarre over-the-top conspiracy theories are really starting to get old, it's almost flat earth believers level.

[danShumway]

> to have people post more photos and keep those metrics up

But... that is data harvesting. When you upload photos to Facebook, you are giving them that data. That's not a conspiracy, that's just how Facebook's TOS works. It gets to look at the photos you upload and use that data to help build its internal profile for you.

What's your definition of data harvesting? I would say that getting people to upload useful data to your servers qualifies.

[spunker540]

Photos and videos of people are not generally useful for ads. You know what is valuable? Actual purchase decisions sent in by advertisers. Photos and videos of people’s dogs and food and kids etc is strictly to entertain the other Facebook users and keep them coming back.

An advertiser is willing to pay tons more to serve an ad to someone who has bought similar products in the past, and is likely to buy their product again, or has recently abandoned a non-empty shopping cart. Or has even just interacted with a previous ad. That is the data that increases ad revenue. Not facial expressions while scrolling or group photos at restaurants.

[mceachen]

I'd hesitate to discount the value of photos.

Photos have quite-accurate GPS and frequently-accurate compass heading. Add face detection and you have location tracking for everyone in frame.

Online tracking is valuable for ad targeting, but physical tracking is as well, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses.

[danShumway]

You're saying this with a lot of confidence, but I'm not certain I believe you.

When you have facial recognition software, photos are a contact graph. When they're photos that a user explicitly uploads, they often come with location data. All of that stuff is useful to advertisers.

Facebook can and does target ads based on who you know. If you upload a photo, and the metadata says it was taken today, and it has you location attached to it, and it shows you smiling next to your friend who's recently searched for the new Avengers movie, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense to show you an add for the new Avengers movie, because maybe the two of you will go to it.

It doesn't even need to be that detailed. Just knowing that you're that person's acquaintance means that now Facebook can suggest that person as a friend, it means that Facebook can add that person to its social graph if they're not currently on the service. Just knowing your location means that Facebook can advertise you something from a nearby store.

All of that is stuff that Facebook wants to know, all of that falls pretty squarely in the middle of the category of data harvesting. Not all data harvesting is just to serve ads, some of it is to know how to tailor the service to you to make you more active (so that you look at more ads), or to suggest friends (which increases your investment in the platform), or how to engineer the service in general (so that more people use it and look at ads).

> Not facial expressions while scrolling or group photos at restaurants.

Facebook used to analyze unposted status updates (where you type out the status and then delete it before you press post) so it could figure out why people were getting cold feet before sharing their thoughts[0]. You really, genuinely believe that they're not interested in your facial expressions? You really, genuinely believe that nobody at Facebook is looking into research like identifying branded products inside of user-uploaded photos?

[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/12/facebook-self-censorshi...

[reaperducer]

Photos and videos of people are not generally useful for ads

If that's true, then how come there was a big hoo-ha a few years ago about Facebook putting pictures of people's friends in ads for unrelated companies, as if the friends were endorsing those products?

Sounds like a very useful way to use someone's photos for ads.

Also, with the state of machine learning, it's hard to imagine how image processing wouldn't be useful for advertising.

I can type "cat" into my phone, and its on-device learning shows me all the pictures with cats in them.

Facebook has the technical ability to scan people's pictures and tell all the cat food advertisers, "Here's all the people interested in cats." Or, even more precisely, scan the photos products or logos and tell an advertiser, "Here's all the people who use your competitor's product."

It's not hard to see where this is going, assuming it's not already there.

[danudey]

Photos and videos of someone and where they are is valuable for ads. The logo on the beer you're holding in your photo with your friends at the bar, the faces of those friends and what drinks they have, the geolocation information in the image metadata, the date and time the photo was taken, and so on. All of that is valuable data to Facebook, and they're operating at a scale that allows them to fully harvest and take advantage of all of that and more.

At Facebook's scale, even tiny, inconsequential data can be useful in aggregate.

[soylentcola]

I would imagine that on a large enough scale, analysis of photo contents, timestamp, location, and correlation with any other FB/app activity at that given time/location can provide a ton of new data points to add to their behavior modeling algorithms.

There may not be obvious one-to-one connections that we would make from the information we see in a photo, but the more data points that can be fed into a model, the more accurate the model becomes.

[heavyset_go]

> Photos and videos of people are not generally useful for ads.

They're great for facial recognition, finding out more about relationships that exist in real life, and building sets of training data. Facebook is in all of those markets.

[NickM]

We're talking about people thinking "this company has done a lot of underhanded stuff in the past, maybe they're doing another underhanded thing that they clearly have the ability and motivation to do."

I fail to see how that is a conspiracy theory at all, much less one on par with believing the earth is flat.

[meowface]

This is the exact same logic behind all conspiracy theories.

[Lio]

Facebook is the company that disables copy and paste in their web app to stop you sendings details to non-users.

Meanwhile they still gather shadow profiles on the same non-users.

They regularly use dark patterns to trick users into more tracking.

Theses are not conspiracy theories, over the top or otherwise, they’re just things Facebook do because they have no moral boundaries.

[klyrs]

> Or, more likely, it's an engagement optimization to have people post more photos and keep those metrics up.

You're responding to a statement regarding impact with a statement regarding intention. You can both be correct in this situation, and comparing your parent to flat-earthers is completely inappropriate.

At best, facebook is willfully neglectful of the impact of their data harvesting activities.

[te_chris]

It’s not conspiratorial if they have form and it’s ridiculously easy for them to do.

[throwaway189262]

Not all of them are conspiracy theory. Facebook was using a "free VPN" app to MITM and read all of users web traffic, including HTTPS. Google had to change Android key management to hardcode the browser keys so nobody would do it again

[TranceMan]

Is it not both?

[pferde]

Doesn't keeping camera on increase battery drain, though? Also, with Facebook being evil and all, what's stopping them from hopping on "hey, the camera is already on, let's not waste that, and use the incoming visual data for something while we're at it" line of thinking eventually?

[can16358p]

It does, indeed. Not like constantly recording though. I think they apply some heuristics that keep the camera on in the background (e.g if you open on story camera frequently and on the main screen, but not while at a screen when camera is not accesible). Otherwise the device would become noticeably hot, but I haven't encountered such an issue.

[redwall_hp]

The way that would make sense, for that particular example, is to start the camera up when the user begins the interaction to open it. Like how https://instant.page/ works. If it takes 200ms to get the camera running, do it while the gesture to swipe over to the camera is in progress. It will take more than 200ms for the user to physically move.

iOS has events for gesture start, in progress, finished and cancelled.

[qwertox]

Assuming that this happens only when the user is actively using the app, I'd guess that the display would consume dramatically more energy, making the camera's usage of the battery negligible, also compared to the benefit of then having a very responsive camera.

In any case, I do think that providing visual feedback to the user is very important. Like a small picture-in-picture-overlay.

[saagarjha]

Many flagship apps absolutely destroy battery life. Just something users put up with…

[higerordermap]

Something users often don't observe even.

The OS should warn about it.

[CaptArmchair]

> Don't want to be the devil's advocate here but just because camera is on doesn't mean anything is being recorded.

This is about consumer trust.

To the vast majority of consumers, a smartphone is a magic box with a lens and a display. What happens inside - how data is stored and processed, how the OS functions, how apps work,... - has been abstracted away behind those "UX optimized" interfaces you just mentioned.

Consumer don't buy black box devices because they trust the few big companies that manufacture the hardware and software: they buy them because there aren't any alternatives that provide the same level of convenience, and can solidly guarantee a due level of privacy as to what happens behind the screens.

When consumers buy a smartphone or download an app, they have to blindly put their trust in manufacturers acting in good faith. And just that has been damaged by plenty of scandals in the past decade.

So, next time you're in public, try to pay attention to this: how many people have taped off the camera of their devices? And why is this product a thing? [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=webcam+cover

It's because there's a fundamental trust issue. Consumers tape those things on their devices because they don't feel in control of what a device does or doesn't record. Covering the camera is literally the only way they feel they are 100% in control.

So, that should leave you with two questions here. (a) If there's a fundamental trust issue about "magic" technology, do you think people will remotely accept any rationalization about "UX optimization" and "not recording" (e.g. your asking them to trust them on your word)? and (b) If people go so far as to tape off their camera lenses because of a deep trust issue, how much sense does it even make to implement such an UX optimization in the first place? Isn't that a tone deaf act of sorts?

I totally understand why this happens, and I can see the convenience of having a snappy camera. It's just that the technical solution to enable this, flies against what people perceive as acceptable.

[yoz-y]

> So, next time you're in public, try to pay attention to this: how many people have taped off the camera of their devices?

I usually do pay attention and so far I have seen one person with a camera taped over. This is just not a thing, no matter how the media wants it to be.

[reaperducer]

My company's health insurance company spiffed everyone camera covers for their computers and phones. When we were in the office, I saw them everywhere, on both company-owned equipment, and on people's personal gear.

They had the health insurance company's logo on them, so when I saw one on a barista's laptop at the Starbucks down the street, I assume she got it from one of our employees and thought it was a good idea. Maybe people just don't know they're available, or cheap.

[CaptArmchair]

You're talking about this person, right?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10102910644965951&se...

[heartbeats]

> Consumer don't buy black box devices because they trust the few big companies that manufacture the hardware and software: they buy them because there aren't any alternatives that provide the same level of convenience, and can solidly guarantee a due level of privacy as to what happens behind the screens.

They still consent to it, though. People do perceive it as acceptable, and use it to share their private information. If they don't want to use smartphones, they're free to move to another country.

[hkai]

It looks to me like the media are still bitter about Facebook allegedly helping Russians elect Trump, and so they make up this non-news and instill panic and fear into people.

Pretty sure that now most people will be convinced that Facebook is recording them secretly.

[orestarod]

Russians did not elect Trump. Americans did. It seems astonishing to me, how Facebook is credited with putting Trump in office, merely by being a means to communicate ads, like it's _supposed_ to be in the first place. If propaganda and ads targeted at swaying the voters one way or another are considered illegal, the whole of election campaigns, ads and party propaganda - because it's propaganda, from both parties - should be banned. Plus, American voters are implied to be, through these accusations, stupid kids that have no judgement on their own, and will fall off a cliff if an ad tells them to. What is true of all this? Can you, if you have first hand experience from the US, enlighten me?

[corobo]

I'd rather the lag tbh. If Facebook has options just assume they picked the scummiest one

[Frost1x]

I'd say that's most corporate entities as a general rule of thumb.

[rbg246]

But we aren't talking about most corporate entities we are talking about Facebook and their scummy behaviour.

If we always say everyone behaves this way we make it acceptable to behave this way.

[Saint_Genet]

If you keep doing malicious things, you no longer get to enjoy the benefit of doubt.

[izacus]

It's one thing to enjoy benefit of doubt, it's another to just make up utterly unbelievable fringe crap that can be explained by hundreds of other explanations.

[noworriesnate]

Snowden revealed a lot of stuff that was the just domain of crazy fringe theories before. Anyone morally okay with facebook's known problems would also most likely be morally okay with spying on users like this. Hence, I agree that giving them the benefit of the doubt is irrational.

[switch11]

yeah, people like to believe Snowden didn't happen

Look back at everything he revealed

That's LITERALLY conspiracy Theory proven to be conspiracy reality

And that guy, Keith Alexander, is now on the board of Amazon

so giving large tech companies like Google, Amazon, FB the benefit of the doubt is insanity

[izacus]

If you missed my point: it's one thing to give benefit of the doubt (which they don't deserve) and it's another thing to just make up dream rantings about what companies are supposedly doing with the data which can be easily checked for truth with basic understanding of underlying mechanisms.

[rbg246]

So you are saying..

A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time'

Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here

Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.

Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.

And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong idea?

[AndrewThrowaway]

Developer: Damn camera takes almost half a second to start!

Tech lead: Can we just leave it on or pre-start it somehow?

Developer: But...

Tech lead: I will think of something.

Tech lead to management: We made camera start 150% faster!

Management: Wow wow wow. It is so great to have such an experienced tech lead we pay so much for.

Tech lead drives into the sunset with his brand new Tesla.

[wil421]

You forgot the part where Tech Lead creates a YouTube channel. His Tesla is featured prominently.

[Alex3917]

"How I made the camera 200ms faster (as a millionaire)"

[troughway]

Hey guys it's Ex-Google, Ex-Facebook, Ex-Tesla Tech Lead

[koonsolo]

I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more like this:

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

[thrav]

This is so true that at other companies it often takes a lawyer (in-house counsel) reminding product that something is legally precarious to stop it, and they still push.

For something that has no real legal ramifications, there’s no way you’re stopping it.

[SilasX]

People will care a lot when news gets out that they were spying on a 13-year-old (or whatever) girl.

[ethanbond]

This is why Facebook's culture is the real problem, and it won't be fixed no matter how many "independent" oversight boards they produce.

[slantaclaus]

+1 for realistic dialogue

[NewOrderNow]

As realistic as this is, it seems like contempt for mediocrity

[diffsensitivity]

That’s how the explicit narrative goes.

The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.

Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to “experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.

[mopierotti]

Camera start up time actually is quite important in my opinion. For example, I stopped using snapchat primarily because it felt laggy to get the camera open. That really grates on you when an app is mostly used for spontaneous image/video capture.

[fatnoah]

>So you are saying..

If I had to bet my own money on what really happened, I'd guess that it's something along these lines:

DEVELOPER: Camera initialization is adding 200ms to app startup

TECH LEAD: Holy crap! We need total startup to be less than 500ms or users start to think things are slow

DEVELOPER: What if we initialize the camera early?

TECH LEAD: Can you do that without recording? It would be very bad if we were recording things.

DEVELOPER: Yes.

TECH LEAD: Do it.

Conspiracy ensues.

[maxsilver]

> Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.

Absolutely agree, but it also wouldn't surprise me if they didn't think about it or didn't care.

If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.

[reaperducer]

If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.

2020? I was thinking 1980. To my memory, it seems to have started with the Savings and Loan scandals, and gotten worse.

Companies went from optimizing for 100-year growth to optimizing for the next three months.

[srtjstjsj]

Is it Facebook's fault that the OS had a bug that triggers the camera notification when the camera is in standby mode?

There's no reputational damage because the world is already split between people who think FB is the devil and people who don't care.

[adpirz]

Worth noting this split is like 3 / 97.

[fdeage]

You forgot a third kind: FB employees.

[dylan604]

No, I would put them squarely in the Don't Care group because they cannot possibly be in a Don't Know group.

[boringg]

I like how it’s people who think Facebook and people who don’t care. Where are the pro Facebook evangelists these days?

[baq]

same place were pro-reality people are. there isn't anything to be for. it just is.

[ufmace]

Considering how many $Billions Facebook has, they can pay me if they want me to speak up for them.

[krisgenre]

Long back there was similar bug in iOS camera itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2413926

[dathinab]

The problem is I can see exactly that happening.

[AlwaysRock]

Since net zero people are going to stop using Instagram from this coming out... Yes.

[switch11]

This is very well put

Not sure why someone is assuming Facebook did this for an honest reason when Facebook is the best example of an extremely dishonest large tech company

*

The founder Zucker berg literally wrote - They trust me, the dumb fucks

He wrote this in college

He has shown a pattern of treating his users as 'dumb fucks'

Again and again more and more data comes up that Facebook is a dishonest company. not a 'by mistake' dishonest, but a fundamentally dishonest company

And always White Knights like this guy show up claiming 'it is to optimize loading speed)

*

Now Facebook is finally getting into trouble with even the left, because instead of helping Obama get elected it seems now they are helping Trump get elected

So their own dishonesty is so extreme that they are trying to help both Democrats and Republicans thinking both sides are dumb fucks that will forget what Facebook did to screw them over in past elections

[jariel]

No, he's saying that API usage is not obvious, things are complicated and not obvious and that mistakes happen.

I don't believe for one second that FB is going to be purposefully taking 'illegal videos' of people.

Nor do I believe Facebook is even evil. It's just a social network, end of story.

[zentiggr]

Amoral does no less harm overall than evil, it's just done to 'the masses', not particular targets.

No one at Facebook gets to claim they were just following orders if they have _any_ understanding of the possible consequences of their work.

(If you believe the authors/operators that specifically maximize profits over responsibility are not responsible for their outcomes, you should read back into the posting about PG&E in CA: deliberately ignoring the wear & tear on 100 year old support hooks on high-tension power lines, thus sparking the fire that burned down Paradise, CA.)

[fabrice_d]

It's true that initializing camera hardware takes noticeable time. We had the same complaint from app developers in Firefox OS and we implement a small trick to improve the experience: when launching an app that has the "camera" permission listed, we start to initialize the camera hardware in parallel with other app startup tasks. That doesn't trigger stream acquisition so it's fully safe, but we gain a few hundred of ms overall when the app actually needs the camera preview.

[kevingadd]

One of the most annoying things is to try and launch your camera on a phone and have to wait multiple seconds before you can hit the shutter, at which point the thing you want to photograph might already be gone. So I can definitely understand the logic behind this, even if it's creepy.

IIRC, Apple has invested specifically in reducing startup latency for the camera, but I don't know if that applies to apps.

[can16358p]

From what I can tell the startup time is more or less the same for both the built in camera app and the third party apps. IIRC built in camera used to start a bit faster in the past but that's not an issue anymore. The problem is that we launch the camera app and because the icon animates from home screen to fill the device window the latency is less noticeable, but for example in Instagram, the app is already open in full screen so starting the camera from a user action, even though it takes the same time with launching the camera app, is more noticeable from a user perspective.

[danudey]

Your point is well said and accurate, and was the first thing I thought of as well.

That said, I think we're well past the point of no return vis-a-vis giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt on basically anything privacy-related. I don't know anyone who would argue that Facebook wouldn't do this if they thought they could get away with it; the "Facebook is listening to my conversations and showing me ads" conspiracy theory gained so much traction, not because people want to believe in conspiracy theories, but because people have no difficulty imagining that Facebook would do something like that if they could.

[rozab]

Sounds like iOS's fault for not providing a way to keep the camera on standby at the expense of battery life, without compromising privacy. Just like how there should be more privacy-preserving methods for querying clipboard contents, as in the similar TikTok scandal when a UX optimisation was mistaken for a data collection issue.

[saagarjha]

> at the expense of battery life

iOS doesn't really like providing APIs like that.

[boublepop]

Very good point. User experience is very important. This is also why Amazon periodically breaks into your home and makes sure they have a complete inventory of what you own, so they can ensure a speedier and more appropriate ordering workflow. At face value this seems unethical, but you have to remember that they are improving your user experience and making money, so it’s all ok. And I mean it’s not like they are stealing anything anyway, and you can’t really expect them to respect your privacy when you’ve signed the eula.

Ups sorry, that seems to be a message out of Bizarro world that crossed over.

[rorykoehler]

It doesn't matter. It's still shady as shit and figuring out good UX with the camera off is a design constraint.

[noexcuses7]

We've gone from "it's a service to share photos with friends" to "Sure, the camera is on, but it's not recording or transmitting!"

Advocating for the Devil generally gets you sent to hell. At this point I don't even really care to hear legitimate technical reasons for this because time and time and time and time again, Facebook continually acts in antisocial ways, and it does so with impunity. I'm so sick of it, and I'm so sick of the apologetics.

Facebook is incentivized to do bad things. Facebook indeed does bad things. Any action they take needs to be examined through that lens. Facebook started out as a social network (well, originally it was a tool to stalk women), and rapidly grew to be a democracy-ending ad machine.

So please don't sit there and make excuses for this company.

[stjohnswarts]

It seems like a dumb move, which is why I don't think they're doing what they're being accused of. It could certainly just be a technical glitch. I don't think they are spying on uses like that. They have -plenty- of data already and getting more everyday..

[kyberias]

Yes. For example, Webex on Windows seems to keep the camera on (led lit) even though I'm not in a call. Irritating. One more reason why I don't love that software. Teams (and many others) handle the camera correctly.

[sizzle]

Why is there no LED light when the camera gets power on a smartphone like a macbook? This is insane that smartphone manufacturers thought it was a good idea to not indicate when your camera(s) activated. I've never understood this antipattern...

[can16358p]

Starting from iOS 14 which was released just a few days ago (I don't know about Android side), it does. It also displays which apps have used camera/microphone in control center recently in case you've missed the subtle dot. I think they've nailed it this time. (Though I personally think the design can improve)

[TeMPOraL]

> As an iOS developer who worked with apps that access camera frequently, I can confidently say that it's just a UX optimization. Starting the camera takes a brief few hundred milliseconds which is easily noticable from a user perspective.

Look at it from a user's perspective:

As a user, I don't know you. I have no reason to believe you. If I see my camera being accessed, I have no way to tell whether the data stream gets processed by the app or sent straight to /dev/null. I'd have to assume the latter on trust. But what reasons to do that does your app give me? The loads of ads assaulting me? Or perhaps the malicious UX dark patterns sprinkled everywhere? The regular media stories about omnipresent surveillance capitalism don't reassure me either.

It may very well be a performance optimization in Instagram, or in many other applications. But users have no way to know it, no way to be sure of it, or (in most cases) no way to even conceive that such optimization is needed. Meanwhile, they have perfectly good reasons to assume nefarious purpose.

[can16358p]

Yup, I don't trust Facebook either. But many regular users (not the people here on HN or reddit) don't even know that that means, let alone care. Facebook knows only a minority would make this an issue whatsoever, and they keep it. Not defending right or wrong, but I think this is just it.

[rglover]

This isn't a good excuse for spying on people.