Your iPhone camera may be secretly 'watching' you, here's how you can stop it

Google engineer Felix Krause has detailed an alarming privacy setting in Apple’s iOS that enables iPhone apps with camera and permission to take photos and videos of you without your permission.

Krause, who is the founder of fastlane.Tools, managed to do it by creating a watch.user concept app published on GitHub to show how far the camera permissions could be pushed. Krause, who works for Google, said he pursued such research in his independent time.

The nightmare scenario, says Krause, can be an app that is installed and asks once for camera access in order to take an avatar image or upload a photo, only to begin constantly watching the user and uploading the pictures covertly.

As per Krause, once an app grants access to both the front and back camera can record you at any time, and even take pictures and videos without telling you. It can also upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately. It can even run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.

This means it may have been recording you while you were on the cam.

What to do to protect yourself

However, all is not lost. Considering that we can't avoid using iOS apps on a daily basis, there are some tips up your sleeve which have the potential to protect you from unwanted peeping.

You can revoke the camera permission from all your iOS apps, and always use the built-in camera app, and use image picker of each app to select the photo from the gallery.

A rather unique but effective way of protection is using camera covers, many different ones are available in the market. Using a sticky note also works, as long as there is something to neatly cover up the camera lens.

Many people including Mark Zuckerberg cover their camera, as per a New York Times report.

However, the foolproof technique, as described by Krause, is to copy and paste of screenshots into your messaging application when you have to share images with others.

Krause also offers several proposals as to what Apple ideally should have done. He suggests putting up a share camera option similar to that of a grant access to a camera, one that works like the share location option.

Also, showing a status bar to indicate when the camera is active and add an LED to the iPhone’s camera on both sides can work as well, similar to the one in MacBook.