Never Give All Your Apps Camera Permission. Here’s Why

There’s a good reason why you should never give every single app you download camera permission. Verimatrix COO Asaf Ashkenazi told The Washington Post in November 2021 that permitting an app to access your camera means forfeiting your privacy to the company that created it. Some tech companies may be trustworthy enough to protect the data their apps record from cybercriminals, but there are other companies that misuse the camera permissions to secretly turn on your camera at any time and record everything that’s going on around you — even when you’re using the bathroom.

It’s one thing for an app to request camera permissions for legitimate reasons, like taking a photo, scanning a QR code or, in Android’s case, to use the Camera Switch feature for ease of accessibility, but when it uses your camera to record your activities even when you’re not functionally using your camera, that becomes a serious privacy issue. In 2017, iOS developer Felix Krause shared a video on YouTube demonstrating how any app you download onto your iPhone can take pictures of you while you’re using it and share them immediately without your consent. Apple has since addressed the issue with the launch of iOS 14.