V3 Cameras are forced not to save unless you give access to all your photos

So if there is a bug about not being able to do a subset, report it to Wyze using a log file.

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It’s not a freaking bug, it’s their way of getting access to your photo files and all your photos.

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Ok so if it’s not a bug, then thank you for bringing the permission change to light so that others know about the change in permission policies then. If you don’t agree with with this change, well no one is forcing you to continue using these products and the terms of service and policy’s in place that come along with them. I don’t like turning folks away from this ecosystem because I think it’s a good system, but I wish and hope more that folks get into something that suits their use case the best, weither that’s Wyze or not.

Looks like this all matches the android permissions now.

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The issue to me is the unannounced and big change to a function that I have used and depended on.

And you are correct, of course, in telling us that we don’t have to use WYZE products. As someone who has purchased WYZE products
since early days, paid in advance to support WYZE’s ability to manufacture some of said products, and continues to wish WYZE success, I think I have earned the right to criticize decisions that I disagree with plus do not have to like or support them. And to be told directly by WYZE staff about the change in response to submitted logs/reports/questions about the change.
Instead I get deafening silence. To my knowledge WYZE has neither addressed this issue directly to camera owners experiencing the possible “bug” nor announced that this change is intentional.
Just tell me. I don’t want to walk away from a company I think I have a relationship with without a response from WYZE.

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This is a user-to-user forum and not a support site for Wyze. Wyze has a presence here, but not the support arm of Wyze. The best way to contact them is by phone at (206) 339-9646 Monday - Friday 5 am - 6 pm PT and Saturday 8 am - 4 pm PT.

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Thank you.

No I disagree. If you see an immoral approach by a company you should inform others and in particular the ones that have no clue that giving full access to their photo files can have consequences. Simply returning a product is not sufficient. You must let the public know. Just like you did not know and now you know. So returning the product is insufficient.

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It is not an unreported bug. I have been in direct contact with the company and they admit that they are demanding direct access to all your photos. This is not only immoral but borderline illegal. The only way it becomes legal is when you give them access in which case I am not.

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Do yourself a favor and delete some stress. Play the video, tap the share icon and email or message it to yourself where you can either save it to your phone or someplace else. Yeah it is a PIA but Wyze won’t have access to your photo album .

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I re-read the process you followed. “Option 1” is not an option – it is step 1 of a procedure. So clicking on it will do nothing. Your actual options are “No thanks”, and “Go to Settings”.

If you choose Go to Settings, you are taken into the iOS settings for the app, where you can choose “Read & Write” or “Never”.

All of my apps on both my iOS 12 and iOS 13 devices have only those two choices, except one news app that has “Add Photos Only” (no videos) in place of “Read & Write”. None restrict access, although Wyze does create it’s own folder to save the files in.

The process is for the app to ask for permission to save to your photo library (not a sub folder) when you try to save a picture after you first install the app.

But then if you later go into iOS settings for the app, and turn photo access off, you get the different prompt you described, asking for the same permissions, but making you go o iOS settings to make the change yourself.

So from my vantage point, nothing has changed, not even a new bug or prompt. And I have no apps that operate differently, at least not on my iOS 12 or 13 devices.

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Antonio’s, no that does not work and it’s my main issue. Because a pop up comes and asks for access to your entire photo file. The partial access does not work. If you don’t agree to give access it will freeze.

Thank you Newshound for such detailed information. I will follow up with the procedure you indicated, but let me ask you, will they have access to all your photos? Thanks

When you give photo album access permission to an app, all those apps have access to all photos. At least on my iOS 12 & 13 devices. However, to the best of my knowledge none have ever been accused of archiving your photos for their personal use. The app just typically does what you ask it to do – read or write the photo or video you are manipulating at the time.

When I give full access to all photos iPhone has a notation on the bottom that doing such will give access to location of photos and all methadata. Perhaps this is why Apple has limited Facebook access to all photos unless you allow it because of their marketing harvesting of data.

These are the only choices with iOS 14.6.

Yes, exactly.

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If you go into you photo album and put check marks on say 5 photos (Select Photos) the video from Wyze will not download, it just says loading continuously and never finishes.

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If anyone would like to learn the IOS app development details of the photo privacy features introduced in IOS 14, you can watch the session from WWDC 2020:

Excerpt from the transcript:

“The old authorization status and request APIs are not limited library or access level aware and are marked for future deprecation. It’s important to note that for compatibility reasons these APIs will not return the new limited authorization status. Instead they will return authorized, even if the user has granted limited photos library access to your application.”

My guess is the Wyze App was updated to the new PHPhotoLibrary API in the V2.20.142 release and someone decided it was too much work to implement as Apple intended. Unfortunately, they broke the implicit “Selected vs All Photos” functionality Apple provided for backwards capability with apps using the old PHPhotoLibrary API.

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I agree, this all started when the iOS app was last updated to 2.20.142. As I stated in the other thread on this issue I had always used selected photos option previously without an issue. Fix one break two :grinning:

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Yes, that’s what happens