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why seize control of camera

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  • 8 have this problem
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  • Last reply by abroke1

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Why do I have to turn over control of my phone camera to install Firefox?

Why do I have to turn over control of my phone camera to install Firefox?

Chosen solution

This is the way Android permissions work, if you ever want to use a phone feature you need to ask for it at install. Not when the request from the website is made. Mozilla is working with the W3C to build these features in a privacy centric way.

If you want a more fine grained control over Android permissions check to see if your phone is supported by Cyanogenmod and use the features it provides to limit app access.

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To support the following HTML specification. http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media-capture/ Like every other permission that Firefox exposes to the web each use of it requires explicit conformation for each access to that service such as camera or gps.

You can check how this feature works in the following demo page. http://people.mozilla.org/~jhammink/webapi_test_pages/CameraAPIdemo.html

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Thanks for the quick answer. I do not understand it but since nobody else seems to be concerned it probably is of no consequence to users. Like Firefox on my laptop but too many other issues for now on the bionic

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Its not a good thing, IMHO, to give any app full control over your camera. It states in the permissions...

"Allows application to take pictures and videos with the camera. This allows application at anytime to collect images the camera is seeing."

At anytime seems a bit scary to me and I'm worried that it could easily be used to compromise your privacy. I've personally removed the app and will be using another browser till this is sorted.

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Chosen Solution

This is the way Android permissions work, if you ever want to use a phone feature you need to ask for it at install. Not when the request from the website is made. Mozilla is working with the W3C to build these features in a privacy centric way.

If you want a more fine grained control over Android permissions check to see if your phone is supported by Cyanogenmod and use the features it provides to limit app access.

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I am not going to use Firefox until they figure another way to go. Plus it is uungodly slow on a bionic Thanks for the note