We have already covered here some apps that were caught accessing users’ clipboard thanks to a new feature of iOS 14, but that’s not all. The next major update to Apple’s mobile operating system also indicates when an app is using the camera or microphone, and that has just exposed Instagram’s app.
According to some reports shared on social networks by users who have already installed iOS 14, the camera’s indicator stays on when the Instagram app is open. Even if the user is not using the camera, as when scrolling through the photo feed, the green dot shows that the app is accessing the camera in the background.
The expected behavior, of course, is for the app to access the camera only when necessary — such as when you open the Instagram Stories composer. However, Instagram told The Verge that this behavior is just a bug.
“We only access your camera when you tell us to — for example, when you swipe from Feed to Camera. We found and are fixing a bug in iOS 14 Beta that mistakenly indicates that some people are using the camera when they aren’t,” the spokesperson said. “We do not access your camera in those instances, and no content is recorded.”
According to the company, the system sometimes understands that the user has swiped the finger to open the in-app camera, which is not always the case. Instagram promises to fix this problem in a future update of its iOS app.
The privacy features of iOS 14 aren’t even available to the general public yet, but they have already caused trouble for some developers. More recently, LinkedIn was sued by being caught reading the content of the users’ clipboard without authorization — the company also says that was a bug.
iOS 14 is currently available as a beta release and it’s expected to be available to everyone this fall.
