Facebook secretly runs iPhone camera as users scroll news feed

iPhone users are reporting an iOS software glitch that secretly runs their smartphone cameras in the background as they scroll through Facebook's news feed.

The discovery has prompted worries that the camera could be covertly recording as people use the app.

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Facebook said the glitch was caused by a coding error and that there is no indication that any photos or videos had been sent to its servers.

Guy Rosen, the company's vice president of integrity, tweeted that Facebook had already submitted a fix to Apple and was investigating what “sounds like a bug.”

“We recently discovered that version 244 of the Facebook iOS app would incorrectly launch in landscape mode,” Rosen said. “In fixing that issue last week in v246 we inadvertently introduced a bug where the app partially navigates to the camera screen when a photo is tapped. We have no evidence of photos/videos uploaded due to this. We're submitting the fix for this to Apple today."

For now, the bug appears to be exclusive to iPhone users running the latest iOS 13 software. Users who have already granted the app access to the camera and microphone may also be affected.

There have been no reports of the problem on Android devices.

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To expose the glitch, Twitter users and media outlets have reproduced it on several iPhones to demonstrate the error while using the iOS version of the app.

Others made efforts to troubleshoot the glitch, saying the issue could be related to the “story” view in the Facebook app, which automatically opens the camera for users to take photos.

As a workaround, technology experts have advised users to revoke camera and microphone access to the Facebook app in their iOS settings.

The bug first came to light earlier this month when several iOS users complained that they noticed the app would occasionally shift the feed and expose the phone's camera.

Then over the weekend, word of the glitch turned viral after Joshua Maddux, a Los Angeles web strategist and owner of web design firm 95Visual, posted a video to Twitter that showed his camera actively running in the background as he scrolled through his newsfeed.

Maddux said he found the same issue on five iPhone devices running iOS 13.2.2, but was unable to reproduce it on iOS 12. “I will note that iPhones running iOS 12 don’t show the camera (not to say that it’s not being used),” he said.

"This is proof that they are accessing your back camera. They may also be accessing the front camera," he said in a tweet.

Meanwhile Rosen, in a series of later tweets, attempted to reassure Facebook users.