I just discovered that the PayPal app is silently accessing my camera on my Android phone. The PayPal app asks for permission to use the camera and I think that's normal for this kind of app because you can deposit checks using the camera or take photos of yourself for a profile picture. But I noticed in my access logs that PayPal had accessed my camera 12 times… even though I never used the check deposit or profile photo feature. So what I did next was enable a trace so when the app uses the camera it would notify me. A few days later (just now) I got the notification. The PayPal app tried to access my camera while the app was not running and my phone was sitting on my desk idle and the screen was off. The camera access seems to have coincided with a payment I received via PayPal. Why would the app want to access my camera when a payment is received is beyond me.
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