Tell HN: Instagram app turns on camera while browsing

[voakbasda]

My wife recently noticed the iOS camera indicator on her iPhone 11 will turn on randomly while browsing her Instagram feed. I found some references to a “bug” from a couple of years ago, but nothing current to explain this behavior. Since this apparently has been going on for years, it is hard to ascribe this to a mistake. Still, I would be interested to hear other perspectives from the HN crowd.

[codeptualize]

> will turn on randomly while browsing her Instagram feed

I think this could be explained by accidentally swiping a tiny bit to the right.

Swiping right will take you to the camera view, so even swiping a few pixels to the right and then releasing will briefly activate the camera.

[filoleg]

That was my first guess as well, so i decided to test it out.

And yep, it was 100% triggered by a slight movement to the right while holding finger down anywhere on the left edge in the main feed. And it happens even if you just move it by a few pixels, to the point where someone else looking at the screen might not notice.

As someone else has already pointed out, OP can just revoke camera permissions from instagram in the phone settings. The app will still fully work, and will just ask for camera permissions if you attempt to use any features that actually require camera access.

P.S. I feel it is rather difficult to trigger accidentally though, and I am saying it as someone with large hands/fingers. It happened to me before a couple of times over the years, but I've noticed instantly, and not because of the camera LED lighting up. I've noticed because the entire rest of the UI becomes unresponsive (e.g., scrolling up/down doesn't work) until you release the "swipe right" gesture hold, which makes perfect sense. So you cannot really stay in that weird state, unless you are committed to holding your finger on the screen in that spot without moving or releasing it.

[codeptualize]

If you are worried about this, you can revoke the Instagram camera permission from Settings, and only turn it on when you actually want to use it.

Settings -> Instagram -> "Allow Instagram to access" -> Camera

The app will still work, it will just prompt you for the permission when going into the camera view.

[voakbasda]

This is a very good guess, but she reports that the camera activity light will stay on throughout her browsing session. Not every time though

In contrast, our tests today show that swiping right to camera mode does cause the indicator to turn on briefly (as expected), but it goes away almost immediately when returning to the normal browse mode. Not the same.

[muzani]

I've always been rather annoyed at how easy it is to sneak in videos and recordings on Android. Even wrote a proof of concept on how to secretly record people and submit the data as plaintext: https://github.com/smuzani/soundrecorder

It was very plausible in the past, but Android and iOS have regularly been ramping up privacy. The latest for Android seems to be that only one app can run a camera at any one time, and a green icon appears at the top of the screen when camera/mic permissions are active.

People always seem to think I'm paranoid about this, but I've been asked by so many potential clients to actually code this in their "free" apps.

As for Meta, there are a lot of things that make me highly suspicious. While we have screenshots of FB and WhatsApp being dodgy (e.g. camera running below the UI, some experiments on linking WhatsApp to FB ads), there's never been any damning proof. So it's best to assume incompetence and not malice.

[warning26]

Related, but I'd recommend trying out Instagram through the browser. The Instagram mWeb experience is surprisingly full featured, and arguably better than the app because it hasn't been (yet) ruined by Facebook's disastrous product ideas.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they ruin it, too, though.

[yur3i__]

The web interface is the only way I interact with Instagram. Unless you rely on DMs for communication (you can DM but without notifications and stuff its a hard sell as a primary method of using Instagram) or post stories there's pretty much nothing missing.

[egberts1]

Say cheese, or delete the damn app.

[leros]

On Android, there is a little green light that turns on when the camera is active. I notice it blip on for a second all the time.

[eurasiantiger]

Do you really need instagram?