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If you’ve already updated your iPhone to iOS 14, you may have noticed a little green dot at the top of the screen when using certain apps. It’s a new security feature that Apple came up with to help you have peace of mind about your camera privacy.
When you see the little green dot, that means there is an app that is actively using your iPhone’s camera. If you see an orange dot, it means that an app is using your microphone.
“An indicator appears at the top of the screen whenever an app is using its microphone or camera,” says Apple. “And in the Control Center, you can see if an app has used them recently.”
What this means is that if you see a green dot but don’t know that no app needs your camera, there may be an app secretly accessing the camera to spy on you.
Swipe down to open its control center will show you exactly which app was responsible for the camera usage.
If you find an app that abuses your camera, you can revoke its camera permissions in your Settings app to make sure it doesn’t happen again (assuming you don’t want to remove the app entirely).
This change is part of a push by Apple to give users more confidence about their privacy through transparency. MacBooks have long had a green light next to the webcam that is turned on by the camera, and now iPhones have a digital version of that same indicator.
In July this year, Instagram was found to turn on the iPhone’s “camera on” indicator even when users weren’t taking photos. This week, a New Jersey-based Instagram user filed a lawsuit against Facebook in federal court in San Francisco, accusing Instagram of intentionally and secretly using the camera to collect “lucrative and valuable data about its users who otherwise mode would not have access “. “
The complaint says that by “obtaining extremely private and intimate personal data about its users, including in the privacy of their own homes,” Instagram and Facebook collect “valuable information and market research.”
Facebook has stated that the “camera on” notification was simply a software bug that triggered a false notification when the camera was not being accessed or used.
Apple’s new iOS 14 camera notification point should help alleviate iPhone users’ fears of this kind of privacy issue.
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