Plus, more newsbytes of the week including a ransomware attack on a hospital and half a million possibly-hacked Call of Duty accounts
Last week, lawyers for Instagram user Brittany Conditi filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against the social platform’s parent company Facebook for allegedly spying on Instagram users in the interest of market research.
The accusation stems in large part to the release of iOS 14, which added features to Apple products that alert users when their devices’ cameras or microphones are being used by apps. Noticing that the green dot signifying camera usage was on without her permission, Conditi and her team concluded that the app was collecting “valuable insights and market research” by “obtaining extremely private and intimate personal data on their users, including in the privacy of their own homes,” according to The Independent.
A spokesperson for Facebook said that the issue was caused by a bug in the app, stating, “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 added that no user content is ever recorded by the app. Avast Security Evangelist Luis Corrons sees this user awareness of privacy issues as a good thing. “Companies have to be held accountable,” he commented, “especially those in the social media industry that have access to all kinds of information on their users. Some companies, like Facebook, have misused personal data in the past – giving access to third parties, for example. In this particular case, Facebook claims that the problem is a software bug ..
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