Social media giant Facebook is looking at a lawsuit yet again, accusing it of spying on Instagram users by accessing their mobile phone cameras. The lawsuit blames the app for using the smartphone cameras even when they were not being used actively.
A report by Bloomberg suggests that the lawsuit is a development on media reports in July, wherein Facebook was first accused of the privacy breach. Its popular photo-sharing app Instagram was found to be the one at fault with specific makes of Apple iPhones.
The accusations blamed the company for spying on the users of the app through the malicious access to the smartphone cameras. The cameras were claimed to be spying on the user, even when not in use.
Facebook had denied the reports at the time and had instead blamed a bug in the app for the concern. Facebook said that the bug triggered false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras. It said that it was correcting it for the same.
Months on, a legal complaint has now been filed against the tech behemoth on Thursday in the federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey. The prosecutor Brittany Conditi, being an Instagram user herself, alleges that the app uses the smartphone camera intentionally for collecting ¡°lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.¡±
By ¡°obtaining extremely private and intimate personal data on their users, including in the privacy of their own homes,¡± Instagram and Facebook are able to collect ¡°valuable insights and market research,¡± as per the complaint.
Facebook has declined to comment on the lawsuit for now.
A similar lawsuit filed last month accused Facebook of using facial-recognition technology to illegally gather biometric data of its 100 million plus Instagram users. Facebook denied the claim, clearing that Instagram doesn't use face recognition technology.