Recent revelations that some apps were collecting contact information and sending it back to developers raised a few privacy eyebrows. This behavior is against App Store policy and some argued that those apps should have been blocked from being approved in the first place. That revelation generated several responses, including some from governmental agencies.
Now it seems that some camera apps also have the ability to collect photos—all the photos—from an iOS device with little or no consent from users. Apparently when a user OKs location information to be included with photos, it opens a backdoor that allows apps to copy the user’s entire photo library. Geotagging photos is popular and has a number of uses including being able to display photos on a map in Apple’s own iPhoto Mac-based application.
One difference between this photo exploit and the contact information exploit is that contact information had actually been collected by some developers through their apps. In the case of the photos, there are no reports that this exploit has been taken advantage of, only that it exists. Developers, and therefore Apple, have known about it for some time. iOS 4, released in 2010, granted access to the photo library to help make photo apps more efficient.
Google has not commented on how its operating system handles this same issue.