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Wolfie you made the claim about an âaudio exploitâ being on iOS and I provided a link showing that it was an old story that was Android-specific; more, the link you provided did not support your own claim about it occurring on iOS. You made the claim (and I responded to it) seven days ago, more than enough time for you to support the claim or perhaps recognize a faulty remembrance. If you make the claim, you should prove it, not me!
If you looked at the links provided in the article, youâd see that many people reported the issue. Battery usage stats called out âFacebook audioâ as a high drain process.
So, there were plenty of smoking guns. At no point Facebook stood up and admitted that it was indeed their guns, but they âhad found a bug and were working on a solutionâ.
TechCrunch article on the same topic.
Right. It was an acknowledged bug. They also said, âFacebook does not use your phoneâs microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed⌠We only access your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio. This might include recording a video or using an optional feature we introduced two years ago to include music or other audio in your status updates.â
Now, if someone wanted to tinfoil-hat their way around that, the result would be massive legal jeopardy for the company were it be lying, jeopardy that could easily result if just one of dozens of Facebook engineers whoâd have needed to have known/worked on that went public (potentially garnering multimillions as a corporate whistleblower in a class action lawsuit).
Now, there are apps which have secretly accessed phone mics - hundreds of them in the Google Play Store using Alphonso tech were reported on in the NYT in 2017. But thereâs no evidence Facebook ever did that on iOS.
The issue wasnât use of the microphone, but the streaming of an in-audible MP3 signal to your handset. This way, like your music player or podcast player, the Facebook app would be considered âin useâ by iOS for a longer period of time. Normal behavior is that unused apps are terminated. This mechanism was allowing FB extended monitoring of your location, in case you had given that permission. Also the âOnly when usingâ permission would extend to the period the app would keep itself artificially alive by serving you an audio stream.
Now, Iâm no programmer, but the presence of a feature that streams audio you canât hear isnât exactly a âbugâ. It didnât find itself into the code by accident. It was a deliberate attempt to work around the coding conventions put in place by Apple to both conserve battery and protect users from being tracked.
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Iâm no fan of Facebook but I donât see that type of tracking as having been proved to have happened on iOS in that case.