Facebook Inc. has been sued in the US for allegedly spying on Instagram users through the unauthorized use of their mobile camera.
According to the lawsuit, the photo-sharing app is accessing the iPhone cameras even when they weren’t actively being used.
An Instagram user Brittany Conditi filed a complaint in federal court in San Francisco, New Jersey on Thursday that the app’s use of the camera is intentional and done to collect “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 can collect “valuable insights and market research,” according to the complaint.
However, Facebook denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting, for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras.
