Expand my Community achievements bar.

Dive into Adobe Summit 2024! Explore curated list of AEM sessions & labs, register, connect with experts, ask questions, engage, and share insights. Don't miss the excitement.

Start camera feed without asking user permission on mobile

Avatar

Level 2

I was all proud of myself because I got a working video demo using the "WebCamera" class on my iPod Touch but it has one irritating problem: the user is asked to start the video feed.  Is there any way to override/disable this so the feed starts when the user clicks on one of my buttons?  It seems silly and useless that a user should have to navigate through both my menu and then click another button to start the camera feed.

2 Replies

Avatar

Former Community Member

Yeah, wouldn't it be awesome if you could just start the camera without the

user knowing? That way, you could spy on them and record what they're doing,

and they'd have no idea. =)

(there's no way to disable this - it's for security reasons - we have no

way to prove that you made them click on a button that says "start sharing

camera" - there needs to be an intermediate native step that confirms with

the user).

nigel

Avatar

Level 2

Actually, it'd be very easy to spy on someone when coding a native Objective C application on the iOS.  In fact, with enough dedication I know it's technically feasible to do the same thing with Adobe Flash Builder, just I don't want to have to senselessly go through that pain.  The iOS doesn't ask users to verify starting a camera feed and it shouldn't - if an application is running, the permissions issues have all been worked out because of Apple's security model, unlike Android, where you have to manually grant permissions for each application.  But even with Android, the permissions have been granted by the user in-advance so it's pointless to re-authorize.

In fact, I haven't played around with it but I'm suspecting that you might even be able to get around the double-verification with your own framework if using Webcam Publishers/Subscribers rather than the WebCamera container.  Actually, I think I'm going to eat my words there because I'm pretty sure you guys have put in the intentional layer of security again with those.

But my point is it's very silly because essentially you're requiring double-verification.  If a user were running these applications on a desktop, Flash would explicitly ask for permission for the application to access the camera and then your container would AGAIN ask to start the camera.  That's pointless double-verification.  The only difference on a mobile application is that the "Flash permission" has already been granted and the application doesn't need the user's permission.

i.e. this is what I'm trying to do:

1. I'm trying to build a game that runs on the iOS where the game revolves around users having a live video feed of each other.  They will already be seeing my menu of "Start Game" and I want the feed to start instantly after they press that button - but rather than that happen, they will see your container that asks them to start the feed first.  That's bad for a number of reasons, especially because it interrupts the user experience and prohibits me from customizing the interface.

Now I'm 99% confident that the container's start camera feature has nothing to do with your security model and is just part of the container.  Any Flash Chat application doesn't have this second-security-layer nonsense built into it and if compiled using AFB, wouldn't have it on mobile either.