today was the second time someone argued with me there is no need to worry about camera spying on modern day android because there is a green dot/light when the camera is actively accessed. i know that. however i always had the suspicion, is that true, is the green dot really shown when an app accesses the camera, or is there a way for apps to access the camera without triggering the green dot, so the green dot really just gives people a false sense of privacy while in reality apps are free to spy on the user. who controls the implementation of the green dot, is that trustworthy or not, and how do i know if it is or isnt.
i remember years back i found out snapchat is or atleast was constantly recording every user of their app, the camera was always active and recording, surprisingly the battery drainage was not really noticable and the phone didnt get hot in temperature. snapchat users thought the app only recorded when they hit record while in reality snapchat was recording at all times. if snapchat still does this today, wouldnt that mean that the green dot would have to be always active.
but the green dot isnt always active on android phones where snapchat is installed and actively running as a background process.
so either snapchat has stopped secretly recording at all times, or they still do it in such a way so that the green do is not triggered.
your Android provider… so you trust them? If not.. please return the device
oh, and they are controlled by the hardware manufacturer (or they are the same entity)
again, trust them …or not
as far as i know, casual smartphones (like mine) cannot allow more than one app to use the camera. if one app uses the camera already, another opened later cannot access it, either crashes down or has error handling, giving something like “failed to access camera”. i wonder what would happen if there is a different way to access the camera, an app utilizes it in the background like the one you mentioned, and there is an app opened later, trying to use it the normal way, would it fail the same way?
(edit)
at least my phone has a very loud camera by design, if i used that app you mentioned, i could tell if the camera is active. maybe a similar sign, like seeing the camera trying to focus (if it has physical focus) can indicate that different camera access method being active and is in use.
(another edit xd)
lower end smartphones also more likely to have a short diration between the app opening its camera activity, and the physical camera actually being utilized, this time (in my cases) the app shows a black screen as camera image, if the camera was active already by some backgound way, the camera activity of the app you open would either fail as i mentioned or probably access the camera instantly, as the camera is already on(?)
Ofcourse i dont trust the hardware provider.
But i trust grapheneOS, which is what i use.
from what i heared, theres a permission called something like keep_camera_state_alive which allows apps to actively enable the camera without the green dot.
interesting read