Is Facebook Watching You Through Your Camera?

In what has become an ever-growing tapestry of Big Brother, surveillance state-esque behavior for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), it must defend itself from another user privacy lawsuit, this time for spying on Instagram users through their phone cameras. Facebook has blamed the issue on a software bug, stating that it has caused false notifications which indicated that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras. 

The suit indicates that this access to users’ cameras when they are not being used within the app gives Facebook “lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.” It was filed by Instagram user Brittany Condti Thursday, 17th of September in San Francisco. It comes just a month after Facebook was accused in a separate lawsuit of using facial recognition data to illegally obtain biometric data on its pool of Instagram users.  

Shouldn’t a headline like that be a little more shocking? The platform that is in a third of the world’s pockets is accused of not only spying on its users, but actually accessing their camera and watching them. Now it’s just par for the course for Facebook, whose legal team must be some of the hardest working lawyers in the world right now. 

Facebook’s scandals are a dime a dozen

Between the political manipulation, hate speech, boycotts, antitrust hearings and user privacy scandals, Facebook seems to have a conveyor belt of bad press coming its way and yet its business remains impervious to all the noise. One wonders if its seedy misdeeds will ever catch up with the company or if the social media giant will continue on its path to the trillion-dollar club unimpeded. All I know is that I’m looking forward to when it launches its new snoring prevention device: 

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