*Facebook has admitted that its app is secretly recording through iPhone cameras, anytime users of the platform scroll through their news feed.
In other words, the camera could be secretly recording you while using the Facebook app, and you wouldn’t know it.
The invasion of privacy can reportedly be fixed by adjusting the iPhone settings.
Facebook said that it “inadvertently introduced a bug” that caused this issue with the camera as part of an attempt to fix a different bug.
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“We recently discovered that version 244 of the Facebook iOS app would incorrectly launch in landscape mode,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “In fixing that issue last week in v246 (launched on 8 November) we inadvertently introduced a bug that caused the app to partially navigate to the camera screen adjacent to News Feed when users tapped on photos.
“We have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug. We’re submitting the fix for this to Apple today.”
Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, confirmed that content was not being stored in the app or sent to the platform.
“Triggering this bug activated the camera preview, and once triggered, the preview remained active until you tapped elsewhere in the app. At no point was the preview content stored by the app or uploaded to our servers,” he wrote in a series of tweets.
“We’ve confirmed that we didn’t upload anything to FB due to this bug and that the camera didn’t capture anything since it was in preview mode. We’ve submitted a fixed version to the App Store which is already rolling out.”
In the meantime, the problem can be fixed by revoking Facebook’s access to the camera in the Settings app.
