For many years I've believed that Facebook and Instagram were secretly downloading phone photos in the background. Because when you go to post a photo, it gets sent far too quickly to have done a download at the same time.

Yesterday I found this video from an Instagram founder, and damned if I wasn't right.

It doesn't appear to be all photos, just the most recent one (ones?). It's not clear from the video if it happens when you launch the app, or when you hit compose. They're doing it on the assumption you're about to post some recent photos. They claim it's okay because if you don't post it, they delete it.

That's classic Meta self-serving bullshit. The "Yeah, it's wrong, but it's okay because we're Meta and we're smart" excuse they always use.

It is not okay to upload my photos without my explicit consent. It's not okay to chew up my bandwidth when I may be deliberately trying to keep it low. IANL, but that first, frankly, sounds like class action material.

It doesn't matter that they claim to delete it. They just introduced a privacy risk. That could have been a nude of my spouse. That could have been a photo of my kid I was sending to my doctor. That could have been a photo of a contract I'm not allowed to share. All to save a few seconds they can brag about.

When Apple allowed you to selectively make photos available to app, I turned the feature on for Meta apps. This makes posting photos a pain, because Meta doesn't uses Apple's UI for choosing which photos they can see and selecting them at the same time. It's a multistep process and it isn't obvious how to do it. Ironically, it means that I rarely post to Instagram anymore. A fact that just reinforces my belief that Meta really wants full photo access and deliberately isn't fixing the issue.

Just updating everyone on the advocacy I’ve been doing with Flexibits regarding Fantastical for Windows.
Flexibits have been seeking advice direct from Microsoft about improving accessibility. There is no doubt that as a company they are committed to making the experience as accessible as their products on Apple platforms. They set an aggressive schedule for getting things improved substantially, but they say they ran into a couple of issues directly with Microsoft and were not able to get all of the fixes in that they were hoping to include by the end of this week.
Flexibits tell me they are getting ready to issue a public release, version 4.0.3, that includes some fixes that should help a bit, however it is not close to being everything they are trying to improve.

So in the next release, they say we should notice some fixes to accessibility, but this is definitely not the finished product.
We can obviously lament the fact that it was released without accessibility included in the first public build, and this is regrettable, but we are where we are, and I have developed a good sense over the years of when we’re being given the run-around and when a company is genuine. I am sure they are now trying to put this right. If it gets done successfully, having Fantastical working accessibly on Windows will be a huge deal for those of us who use this app extensively on Apple platforms. I’ll keep everyone posted.