[snip]
This company would take peoples pictures copywrite them and sell them as stock photos. She took a picture of herself and two of her friends. This picture and all her other pictures was downloaded and sold to a marketing company. […]
Yikes, that's a terrible thing to happen! (This is why iOS has granular permissions, demanding express user consent for each individual type of access, not just all-or-nothing.)
...
iOS permissions would do squat about this, please don't perpetuate this nonsense. Even iOS doesn't have a "don't sell my photos as stock photos" permission setting. Only camera access and some control of filesystem access - exactly the same as Android does these days (yes I have done app development for both).
This kind of crap is what you will typically find in the app's EULA (license) or privacy policy - which nobody reads and some applications don't even display it, only putting it somewhere in a dark corner of the app or their website.
AKA:
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
E.g. Instagram has tried to pull this off a few years ago when they have sneaked a bit of legalese into their EULA/Terms of Service that would have let them to sell your images. They have very quickly backed down when the inevitable PR shitstorm started.
Apropos, Beamin, wasn't this the original story instead?
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/01/africa/stock-image-face-advert/index.htmlIt went through the press worldwide a few weeks ago. Except it wasn't about a smartphone app stealing photos but someone who got tricked into doing an actual photoshoot and didn't read the contract/release they have signed there.
I suspect that what you heard has actually started as the story above and then it "morphed" into "smartphone app stealing pictures for an unsavory company" thing somewhere on Facebook ...
IMO, using people's smartphone pictures and selling them as stock photos is a rather strange idea - legal and ethical issues of that aside, it would be an incredibly inefficient and wasteful way of getting images. You would need an army of people to pour through the loads of selfies, pictures of food, pets, naked penises and what not, all in miserable quality, poor lighting and framing to find maybe one semi-usable image that someone could actually buy. Hiring a photographer and a few models would be both more effective and cheaper.
And even then the pictures would have potential legal issues around copyright and personal rights (you can't just sign a copyright away or an actor's release by clicking "accept" button when the app asks for file access permissions - that is unlikely to fly in courts but IANAL).