>I'm really surprised camera privacy took this long to arrive, and I wonder what the reasoning was for not implementing it at the same time as microphone permissions arrived in iOS 7.

I don't think apps could take photos without you explicitly triggering the process, so no permission was needed anyway IIRC.

Using the lower level AVFoundation classes to start a capture session, any app could absolutely get live camera access to either front or back camera without the user knowing anything. I know because my app shows a live preview to the user right when the app starts up, no permission required, direct access to pixels, and if I chose not to display the UIView that shows the live camera data, that would not change my app's access to the data (under iOS 7 and earlier, I mean).

It's possible Apple screened for non-camera apps using those APIs to keep spying apps out but (Edit: bad example, this was an Android app. I had said: "there was that flashlight app that was storing/reporting user GPS locations without permission so obviously things were slipping through the old system.")