The countdown annoyance could also be mitigated by adding an "always allow" option to the user countdown indicator or recording notification UI. That way a user can grant her favorite alternative Camera application persisted access to immediate stream access. Those two concepts combined solve the issues I identified earlier.
The delay could actually be combined with a dialog as well - perhaps something like the typical "allow camera access?" dialog, but with a timer that defaults to the "yes, this time" option after a few seconds. The more opportunities the user has to permanently grant or deny camera access, the better the user experience becomes for apps the user actually intends to use - remember, ideally these security additions should impact the malicious apps more than apps that have a genuine need for camera access. Jason Miller 519.872.0797 // developIT <http://developit.ca/> // Jason Miller Design<http://jasonmillerdesign.com/> *Developer of amoebaOS <https://amoebaos.com/>, Shutterborg<http://shutterb.org/> & more * On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Adrienne Porter Felt <[email protected]>wrote: > The trick with a notification is that you want the user to be able to say > "ack! not wearing pants! stop!" before the app actually gets any data. > There are some ramifications of this: > > * You probably want a software notification so that the user can click on > the notification and halt the recording. (You can't do that with a > hardware light.) > > * You want a short delay between when the API call is made and when the > data is delivered to the app so that the user can notice the notification > before it starts. You can even represent the delay to the user as part of > the notification (a flashing red light with a countdown of 3, 2, 1...). > > The delay might be annoying in some apps, even though it isn't very long. > For those apps, you could have a button that demonstrates that there is > user intent to capture camera data, so you don't need the delay. > > On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Jason Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Also of interest here, it might be a nice touch if the persisted >> "recording" indicator UI had an option to report suspicious camera use >> after forcing a camera stop action. That information could be extremely >> useful in automating the process of filtering out malicious apps using the >> camera. >> > > That sounds like a really good idea to me! > _______________________________________________ dev-security mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security
