Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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iOS -YouTube app showing augmented ads now (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've not seen this before but it was strange.

An ad loaded at the end of a video, so I paused it. What caught my eye was the background was moving when I moved my phone, which turned out to be the room I was in. The ad was overlayed on whatever my camera was looking at, but the ad appeared stretched from a single point in the middle of the screen, which was even weirder.

Edit: The ad was using the rear camera, not the front facing one.

I've looked through my phones settings and there are no options to toggle YouTube's camera access either, so I feel like it's safe to say this is being forced on users (surprise /s).

Needless to say, that app is no longer on any of my devices :)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If there's no setting in the iOS Settings app to take away the camera permission (which isn't even given by default and the app has to ask for it), it can't access the camera (unless it exploits a potential vulnerability in iOS, which I highly doubt).

It probably used data from motion sensors and the reason you saw your room was because of the glossy display. Or you have allowed the YouTube app to access your camera.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I agree with your logic but when I reinstalled the app to see if I did allow camera access, the only prompt that came up is to request permission to send notifications.

Then again, it was logged in with a Google account so maybe it has something to do with the account permissions? I'll be able to investigate that later tonight to be sure but even after logging out and a fresh download, it still prompted for only notifications.

Regarding the glossy screen, it was displaying from the rear facing camera. I apologize for not mentioning that in my post but I'll update it to reflect that.

Edit: typed front facing instead of rear facing