IMO Apple should provide the user with audit logs of which photos/videos were accessed by each app. It might be a long list but it alleviates doubt and would put huge pressure on reputable developers to ensure they don’t get caught doing things the user wouldn’t have expected (even if the user technically allowed it).
I don’t understand why apps need access to my photos at all. (with some very specific exceptions,) apps should only access a photo, which I first select using the system photo picker. There’s no need for apps to access the entire camera roll just so I can select one photo to use with that app.
I know that that’s partially implemented with the limited photo access now, but it’s confusing from a UI perspective and I don’t understand why this isn’t the default.
The only apps that need full access to my camera roll, are apps like Google Photos, Nextcloud or Immich. Everyone else can suck a lemon.
To your point there are plenty of apps that explicitly operate on the photo reel so the api/permission is needed. Steelmanning the point: plenty of apps request photo permissions that shouldn’t need it. This is really an Apple problem though. They have their selective access option which is a patch on the problem inconvenient for the user. I have two apps that end up requesting photo permissions because basic things like saving or loading a photo require the full set of permissions. I would much rather Apple just have a widget that allows me to pipe that data in as a black box, since the pop up message is distracting and I only need the most basic capability. Instead they do some prop 65 warning where even the most basic and reasonable uses trip the warning and what’s app is allowed to scan your entire library with the same permission.
iOS already has exactly the experience you describe and it clearly urges you toward sharing only specific photos.
The only feature request I have is to be able to scope app permissions to an album, since the current flow of selecting individual photos adds a lot of friction.
Unfortunately, no. It allows you to select which photos an app has access to, and I doubt anybody uses it more than once because of how many taps it takes to include a new photo. Unless I'm missing something.
You're right, I think a better UX would have been to let me select which photos I want to use like a normal camera roll picker and to just automatically make that photo available to the app requesting it rather than me having to first go and approve which photos to make selectable and then going to select it after.
That’s exactly what OP asked for. To select which photos an app has access to using the system picker so they can’t see the whole camera roll.
No. I want to select photos the app has access to now. I don’t want to readjust my selection every time I want to upload a new photo. What I want is an upload button like in the browser.
I click “add photo”, the system dialog opens, I select a photo, and then that gets sent to the app. Somehow, Apple managed to screw that up.
No, they (and I) want it to work like the web browser file upload component where you don't need to grant permission ahead of time because it's nonsensical.
Imagine if every time you wanted to upload a file online, you first had to allow the one website to access that image first in one menu before you could select the image in the normal file upload menu. That's the UX they're complaining about.
Well, no. It keeps giving permission to the app, and it’s a lot of clicks to manage.
It shouldn’t give access at all, but use a secure clipboard implementation so that only that app can read it out exactly once.
Whether you share it once or in perpetuity is of no practical consequence. They already have the photo at that point.
I agree about the clicks—the UX should be one-shot select and share with the permissions handled implicitly.
Even android has it!
> I don’t understand why apps need access to my photos at all. [...] There’s no need for apps to access the entire camera roll
So apps like Google Photos or other alternatives to the Apple made Photos app just shouldn't exist at all, if I understand you correctly?
Did the parent edit their comment? Because your response seems to directly ignore multiple things they said.
Right now the comment says the same as when I wrote my comment:
> I don’t understand why apps need access to my photos at all [...] There’s no need for apps to access the entire camera roll [...] The only apps that need full access to my camera roll, are apps like Google Photos, Nextcloud or Immich
Which still make me ask the question: They think no apps should access all photos, there is never any need for that, and these app currently do that and they need that, so are they saying those apps shouldn't exist at all?
They literally say
“The only apps that need full access to my camera roll, are apps like Google Photos”
Obviously they don’t think the apps shouldn’t exist.
Third party photo app developer here. You're right, it's crazy that it's basically all or nothing.
Apple actually has a great API for selecting a single photo in a privacy-respecting way which does not give the developer access to the library at all. [0] But oddly, there is no corresponding API for safely saving or updating a photo in the library. So if your app involves editing a photo, you can't use this API.
The only option you're left with is to request photo library access with that scary dialog.
If the user selects the limited access option, it's not just confusing—it's a prohibitively bad user experience. If the user snaps a new photo and wants to edit it in my app, they have to tap a "Select more photos" button in my app, find the photo in the picker, close the picker, and then select the photo again in my UI.
Personally, I evaluate full access on a developer-by-developer basis. Indie app developers are highly unlikely to nefariously scan your entire photo library, as they lack any incentive or motivation to do so. So I give apps like Darkroom or Halide full access.
Meta, on the other hand, has every incentive to scan my whole library, and I assume they would. So even though it makes posting to Instagram much more painful, I selected limited photo library access for Instagram.
Apple really needs to introduce a safe way for developers to access just the photos/videos users select, and then update those assets.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photosui/photospic...
yeah they do that for location*, they should warn if an app is constantly accessing the camera roll
For what it’s worth, iOS does warn when an app has full access to the photo library for a while. E.g.:
> "WhatsApp" has been able to access your entire photo library for 6 months. Do you want to continue to allow full access?
Screenshots: https://macreports.com/app-has-been-able-to-access-your-enti...
Yes, but it's not clear to a regular user that an app can access this camera roll without a user's input.
Do you mean prompting for permission to scan local networks? “Localization” normally refers to translating an app into another language.
Sorry I meant "location", when an app is accessing gps too often, they send a notification (e.g: I get a weekly notif for foursquare)
I believe they are referring to the icon that appears in the status bar when an application is using location services (including in the background).
> would put huge pressure on reputable developers
It wouldn't put any pressure on Meta
In the iPhone you can select which photos are accessible by apps.
It’s a big pain because then you have a double-picker: first pick the pictures in the native dialog asking you to decide which pictures the app should have access to, and then select again the pictures you want but this time in the WhatsApp picker. It’s very awkward.
A solution would be that Apple builds a privacy preserving picker in the OS, then mandates apps use it instead of giving them access to the camera roll and letting them roll their own pickers in the first place.
> A solution would be that Apple builds a privacy preserving picker in the OS
there is already one, the enforcement point is what's missing
this already exists, many apps use it. I do wish it was mandatory for _all_ apps to use it instead of being optional.
I locked whatsapp out of my photos and contacts years ago. If I need a pic I copy paste it in.
Yes it is friction but I simply do not trust the Zuck
I get your point, but there are so many more evil actors in Meta beyond “Zuck”. Reducing a company to a single person silently excuses all other awful people actively working there
Modern Android has this too. I'm not sure what all distros it's in, since my Pixel 8 Pro doesn't have it, but LineageOS does and so does my cheap ass Motorola G 5G.
Even better, the app can use the OS image picker and don’t have any other access to photos.
It won’t work for all use cases, but when it works it’s very practical. I’d love to see apps use that as the default - and request additional access only when the user’s current action actually requires it.
Might be related
"Facebook patent uses image recognition to scan your personal photos for brands" https://www.fastcompany.com/90333067/creepy-facebook-patent-...
"faulty pixels, lens scratches, other ‘camera artifacts’ and metadata within the image would be used to associate Facebook users with particular images. " https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2015/09/18/facebook-wa...
I've removed all Meta apps other than Whatsapp (and I don't love that). I haven't had the Facebook app on my phone in well over a decade. Had Instagram for a while, I was casually active on it, but Meta just keeps convincing me not to be trusted.
Facebook mobile is a suboptimal experience, which is fine, it just reminds me to use it less.
I treat WhatsApp as a hostile app[1], which means I deny any access to my stuff even if I get a subpar experience. In places where it's required (as where I live), this is the bare minimum a privacy-minded person can do.
[1] https://manualdousuario.net/en/a-less-affectionate-approach-...
On iOS, whatsapp is weirdly pushy about getting unlimited access to your photo album.
They also go out of their way to make it hard to save a photo without granting full access. Creepy.
What I do is open the photos app and then either copy & paste into the whatsapp message field or use the sharing dialog to share a photo / video on whatsapp. I guess that would also work for the files app. It’s extra steps but it’s worth it for me.
IME giving it "limited access" works well; you can save anything without issue.
What pisses me off, though, is that I didn't find a way to give a contact a name without allowing it access to the phone's contacts.
Tested it, and yes, when I increase the access from "Add Photos Only" to "Limited Access" I can add photos again.
But now Whatsapp retains access to all the photos I added unless I go into settings and revoke access to those photos. Creepy.
And yeah the contacts thing also pisses me off. They know what they are doing.
>But now Whatsapp retains access to all the photos I added unless I go into settings and revoke access to those photos. Creepy.
Not really, given whatsapp could be theoretically keeping a local copy and the operating system can't really do anything about it. It would also be a pretty weird case to code. Imagine writing an app where if you tried to save a file, you couldn't immediately access it afterwards.
> Imagine writing an app where if you tried to save a file, you couldn't immediately access it afterwards.
It works fine in other apps such as Signal and even Teams.
I don't really want Moxie or MSFT to have persistent access to any part of my personal photo album either, no matter how good they say they'll be.
My solution to this is to go
Photos -> share photo -> whatsapp
Instead of starting from whatsapp
I was going to proudly boast that I don’t have any Meta apps on my phone. Got rid of FB a long time ago, never jumped on the Instagram train.
Then I your post and now I realize I’m still in the Meta world. Forgot about whatsapp for a second.
There is a reason they paid so much for it. In a lot of the world, they’re essentially required.
And next to impossible to get rid of. I would much rather use Signal but convincing even privacy-conscious people to switch is an uphill battle.
I find a lot of people (including myself) had a pretty bad experience with Signal years ago, and it has put them off using it today.
Signal is quite good these days for what it is worth. My whole family switched and hasn’t missed whatsapp. That said I am still stuck on whatsapp, it is basically the only messaging app people use in a lot of the world and used by a ton of businesses.
I gave up Samsung Galaxy entirely over this .. even ended up switching to iPhone because I couldn't find another Android I liked as much.
Every Galaxy I ever owned came with uninstallable facebook apps, despite paying over 1k for the phone.
On the last one I had, I went in and did the ritual deleting facebook, and going in the settings to disable their other background apps.
I checked the phone 8 months later, and found that they had installed even more facebook apps that were now running without my consent.
That was the end of those phones for me, and I'm amazed that I put up with it for so long.
> came with uninstallable facebook apps
You mean ununinstallable.
While I still have WA installed for unrelated reasons, I'm so happy for Matrix Bridges...
Years ago, I installed the Facebook app on my phone. I immediately uninstalled it when I saw, horrified, that it had hoovered up all my photos and uploaded them to Facebook (there was no fine-grained storage permission at the time) "for my convenience". I never ran their app on my phone, again.
Facebook seems like an exceptionally morally rotten company, which I guess just stems from Zuck being in control.
Meta is by far the most shamelessly insensitive tech giant. They must actively seek out the most morally depraved devs, I can only imagine the people in those meetings when discussing some of these implementations must have been laughing at how devious they are.
This should be a non-issue if you use Apple’s privacy settings to limit Facebook to only have access to the photos you want to use.
I’d highly recommend never granting any app full access to your photos.
Apple should improve the UI of this photo selection because it’s very cumbersome to scroll and select the same photos twice.
Agreed. The feature set is in desperate need of the search option both on approved photos and when attempting to approve additional photos. Very often I have to go into the photos app, find the photo, make a mental record of approximately where it is in history and scroll scroll scroll. Obnoxious and cumbersome.
What I really want is to create a special photo album for (Facebook/Instagram/Slack/etc.) and have it automatically gain access to whatever photos I put in there.
You should do this for apps even if you trust them.
One issue with permissions is that they apply to the entire app, including any third-party dependencies. Lots of apps use libraries given to them by advertising services -- they notoriously exploit permissions given to the app.
WhatsApp used to (still might) default to saving all photos from any chat to your phone. This led to some very surprising and unwanted photos being saved to my iPhone gallery. What a stupid idea.
I think it’s off by default and you can activate it separately for each discussion.
Android also has limited photos access nowadays.
That's on newer iOS versions and, by extension, on newer Apple devices only though.
Photo library permissions have been around since iOS 14. As long as you have an iPhone made in the last ten years you should be able to use it.
Apparently this functionality was released in iOS 14, which was supported by the iPhone 6S, released in 2015, so any phone in the past 10 years should have support for it. That seems reasonable enough.
Facebook has been doing this for well over a decade. I once got a notification from the Facebook app, "Do you want to share this photo with Kim?" because Kim was just randomly in the distant background of a photo I had taken of my daughter at kindergarten drop-off. I deleted the Facebook app that day and I make a point to never give any social media app access to my photo library.
One way to deal with the current mess is to use a dumb enough phone only for banking/insurance/chat, a dumb phone for calling and texting, and a camera for photos. It’s less convenient but it’s better for privacy.
Some of these comments are interesting to read. Haven't we learned from Cambridge Analytica in 2018? Or the various other scandals over the past 20 years? I can understand normal people not caring but how people on HN still use Meta apps is beyond me.
By definition they are social apps, so it's not usually up to just individuals whether to use them. For example if I stopped using what's app I'd cut myself off from the majority of my friends and family.
If you're not paying for it, you are the product.
I finally got around to rebuilding my pihole. My wife's phone as absolutely rife with requests for various Real-Time Bidding (RTB) domains. It was a flood of them like I really haven't seen before. I didn't do much troubleshoot, but when we looked at her phone, the Facebook app seemed like the likeliest culprit. (Facebook, after all would be the best-placed to have the user data required to actually participate in RTB.)
Once we deleted the app, the RTB requests went away for good. I've had pihole previously, and she's had the Facebook app previously, and we never seemed to have this issue. Perhaps Facebook is drudging up whatever profits it can since it's mostly cornered the population, and is potentially in decline.
Meta can't scan my phone if I don't install Meta's apps on my phone.
A web browser on the phone removes the need for a lot of "apps".
I need whatsapp to communicate with global KOLs for work.
Some years ago I stopped used Snapchat, because Snapchat would occasional notify me a "highlight" with a picture from my camera roll. To do that it meant that Snapchat need to have all my pictures on their server, I figured. Not what I signed up for.
Better yet - use the phones built in app restrictions to block or selectively allow photo access.
When a corporate does shady shit the last thing you'd do is trust the tools they provide to limit that. That's just insane.
>"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg
You trust the tools because one of the few things the company can actually get in trouble for is outright lying.
Well, the good news is: I think this finally gave me a good reason ( one she would accept that is ) to convince wife to drop FB from phone.. yay...
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)
There are hundreds of ways to secure a laptop and ensure your privacy. Why are there almost no good ways to use a smartphone in a secure and private way?
The kind of shady practices we have seen from this company, any self-respecting individual will be ashamed except Zuck. He has done more to rot the collective brain of a generation than any single figure in tech history.
The truth is, Meta isn’t building community, it’s building a surveillance hellscape where every click, glance, and pause is commodified. If you work there and still believe you're doing something good for the world, you're either delusional or willfully blind.
this benefits few and violates the privacy of millions… can we get a some fckin privacy laws yet
Is it 2012? We've known this forever.
1 : open the Facebook app.
Nope... I'm using a link to my Facebook homepage saved on the home screen.
The big tech companies are now becoming archetypal evil — directly analogous with the ancient stories of 'deals with the devil'.
The devil cannot take your soul, but if he can get you to agree to a deal... well... good luck with that.
Here, the devil gets you to agree to some nice beneficial feature like "camera sharing suggestions ... for personalized creative ideas, like travel highlights and collages" or "cloud processing" for whatever benefit. AAaand you do, and there goes all your private photos. And the devil can rightly claim "but this is a mere contract dispute and the user agreed to all of this".
The ancient tales were supposed to be warnings, not How-To guides.
And of course now, these modern devils are just flipping the "Agree" button under the software all without your actual consent.
I do not let ANY Meta property or software run on any of my devices. If only everyone did the same.
How is the app accessing my photos on iOS when I have not given the app permission to access photos? Did they really find some exploit around this? Or is this photos permission really not the only way?
Same question for Android.
My guess is that this only affects people who have granted FB the permission already.
Why do apps request persistent access to camera roll at all? I don't want to manage a custom set of pictures. I want to send a picture now by selecting it.
Apps like Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp refuse to show me the regular old photo picker. I have to enable "limited access" and select the same photos twice (first add to the set, then select for sharing). It's infuriating.
PS: The exception is media management apps, but those are extremely rare and irrelevant in the context of social media and communications apps.