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Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#41

Post by mic47 »

miloshadzic wrote: post #39
mic47 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integrity teams at FB are teams that handle abuse on the platform, and other bad things (fake accounts, spam, malicious developers, malicious ads, ...). Why integrity? Bunch of teams (not all) that did abuse had integrity in their name (like site integrity, platform integrity), so I guess that the name just sticks. And what does VP of integrity do? Manages organization that handles abuse on the platform.

I guess VP of Abuse is just not a good look

well, VP of Abuse is exactly as good as VP of Spam. You know, it's not clear, whether you are trying to to reduce abuse/spam, or create it.

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#42

Post by LoSboccacc »

supermatt wrote: post #21
edf13 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true... Previous versions used to take an age to load up the camera screen/swipe action was blocked (assuming the initialising process). So looks like this may of been their attempt of fixing the UX

They have been doing it for as long as I can recall. Its common practice. From my perspective, the problem is that they arent acknowedging they do that - they are instead saying its a bug that they have fixed - but you can be sure they are still preinitializing the camera...

what they meant is they fixed the bug that made people notice

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#44

Post by jhgg »

supermatt wrote: post #12

Such bullshit. They definitely initialize the camera in the background. That is how you are able to simply swipe to your camera view and it is immediately active. Otherwise you would get a slight delay while the camera is initialised. What they are calling a bug is that the user actually saw it it rendered to a view... Have no doubt - this happens on ALL apps that dont have an apparent delay on switching to a camera…

Looking at the videos, it looks like the camera opens when the main view is swiped to the right. And you can see a ~300ms delay between when he swipes down and when the camera starts. This makes sense, because the way you open the story feature on FB is to swipe right. It's a good UX feature to start booting the camera as soon as you initiate the gesture, rather than when you've fully navigated so the camera is ready when you've finished your swipe.

Their layering system also pushes the view slightly to the right to create a perspective effect when it transitions back to the app from viewing an image.

Of course, this triggers the component that thinks the app is starting to pan to the right - and starts the camera and renders to the view behind the main view.

This seems totally plausible to be a bug - and I'm not sure why other commenters on HN aren't bringing this up.

Their app is fairly complicated, and it's totally reasonable that the team that worked on the story feature assumed that the only thing that would cause the view to move right was a user gesture. However, it looks like their layering system also caused it to move right as part of a perspective transition. This sounds like a bug to me.

If you really wanted to keep the camera open in the background, there are other ways to do so, such as literally not rendering the image to a visible framebuffer upon initiating the AVCaptureSession. iOS does not require you to attach a AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer to the capture session - and you could very easily just take those frames and process them without ever showing a preview to the user.

The bug is not that they were capturing in the background, but that the perspective transform of the main view caused the view behind it (for the story camera feature) to think the user was swiping the main view to the right and to start up the camera to make sure it's ready asap. Running the camera in the background is actually pretty expensive - you don't want to suck power doing so. As much as facebook wants your data, it also wants you to regularly interact with the app. If users think the app is draining battery too fast - they'll use it less throughout the day to preserve battery life. Making sure it isn't a power suck is important to their core business.

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#45

Post by rshnotsecure »

I have been going back and forth on this heavily, but two weeks ago I reached out to ISC2 and ISACA’s ethics boards to begin exploring the process of terminating the certifications of several FB employees that potentially (let me emphasize 110% blameless until proven otherwise) have been in violation of the ethics code for both of those orgs.

I asked ISC2 in particular that if a certain employee was shown to be on XYZ team that handled XYZ task, if they had say ignored multiple outreaches from the community, and then also (this is key) not raised concerns internally to a reasonable degree that a single individual can in a megacorp...could their say CISSP be revoked. The answer I got was a strong yes in the hypothetical stories I proposed.

I also emphasized that I would be writing an apology to said employee, and offer to resign / terminate my CISSP/CCSP if wrong because we have to prevent this process from becoming a no-lose vindictive game.

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#46

Post by bracobama »

supermatt wrote: post #12

Such bullshit. They definitely initialize the camera in the background. That is how you are able to simply swipe to your camera view and it is immediately active. Otherwise you would get a slight delay while the camera is initialised. What they are calling a bug is that the user actually saw it it rendered to a view... Have no doubt - this happens on ALL apps that dont have an apparent delay on switching to a camera…

Honestly this is the reason why I only give apps temporary permissions through an android app called Bouncer. Prevention is better than cure.

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#47

Post by icebraining »

goatinaboat wrote: post #38
have_faith wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he's much more likely to be targeted than any of us for things like that?

In a building he owns, on a network he owns, defended by an army of network engineers he employs? No, he’s not protecting himself from any external threat.

Couldn't he just tell that army to add an exception for his account?

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#48

Post by ic4l »

have_faith wrote: post #35
nealdt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also nice reminder about that lovely photo of Zuck with a sticker covering up his webcam. Now why would he do something like that ... ?

Because he's much more likely to be targeted than any of us for things like that?

Not sure who downvoted you. But I agree 100% with this, he is a high value target.

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#49

Post by 9dl »

ic4l wrote: post #48
have_faith wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he's much more likely to be targeted than any of us for things like that?

Not sure who downvoted you. But I agree 100% with this, he is a high value target.

So we, filthy plebs, have low value and because of that we have to share our data for free

Nice

Re: Facebook says a bug caused its iPhone app’s inadvertent camera access

#50

Post by moooo99 »

bigiain wrote: post #24
Daniel_sk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the developer can change the notification channel ID (which they use to group similar notifications and the user can disable a specific channel) and then you basically start with a channel without previous settings. You would have to disable all notifications for an app completely (not just a specific type) to prevent this for the future.

Or, you know, delete the demonstrated-untrustworthy app from your device...

Thats what bothers me the most about my Samsung phone. Facebook came preinstalled and I cannot uninstall it. I can only deactivate (whatever that means).

I don't use facebook, I actually never did. Its not the fact that I'm loosing a few MBs of storage that really bothers me, it's the fact that this is the facebook app.

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