Instagram Turns on Your iPhone Camera While Browsing Feeds, Fix Coming

As of 2020, there are over 1 billion active users on Facebook-owned Instagram. With devices needing regular iOS updates, many apps have to roll out new versions for optimization.

In the latest iOS 14 beta, Instagram has been caught activating users’ phone cameras unexpectedly. Without using the app to take photos or videos, the camera indicator seems to be toggled, even when just browsing the Explore page.

Check out what user @KevDoy experienced earlier this month below:

Casually browsing Instagram when suddenly the new iOS 14 camera/microphone indicator comes on. Then control panel ratted out the app behind it. This is going to change things. #iOS14 pic.twitter.com/EnTIRsqq3R

— KevDoy (@KevDoy) July 17, 2020

An Instagram spokesperson talked about the bug as reported by The Verge,

“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.”

Instagram isn’t the only app that has been having troubles with iOS 14. This new iOS update coming this fall notifies the user of app behaviours (like copying clipboards). Tiktok, Reddit, The Weather Network theand other apps have all been accessing the content of device clipboards, for reasons unknown.

It seems like this isn’t the first time a camera-related bug has happened. Instagram’s parent company Facebook faced a similar issue last year. Even though this was patched quickly, it still worried quite a few people about the privacy of apps.