iOS 9 Removing Camera Access From Lock Screen Some guy took my Son's iPhone and took 1,200 photos within 12 minutes. He was able to use the camera from the lock screen without having access to the locked phone.

These photos completely wiped our family's Photo stream (and replaced our vacation photos with nonsense). Also, the storage was filled and my son couldn't even make a phone call before we deleted the 1,200 photos.

Deleting the photos was even more annoying. Can you imagine the tedious process of deleting 1,200 photos on an iPhone?

This was very annoying, and also a usecase Apple may not have thought of. 

Somebody mentioned that you can disable control center on lock screen. (Settings>Control Centre>Access on Lock Screen). To my surprise, this brings back a camera button on the lock screen. So that didn't work.

An old post suggested that the only possible solution would be to completely disable camera and FaceTime. But this is not really a solution (would be comparable to painting the camera lens black).

Back to the question: In iOS9, how do I disable camera access on the lock screen?

Related (but not quite the answer):


Removing camera button on iPhone lock screen – (Feb 2015, AskDifferent)
How do you disable the camera from lock screen on iPad? – 2014, Apple Support Forum
I WANT TO DISABLE THE LOCK SCREEN CAMERA – 2013, Apple Support Forum
It's looking like you cannot suppress the photo icon from the lock screen and iOS 9 has no difference in behavior from iOS 8 (so this really looks like a duplicate question to me since iOS 5 in fact...) unless you disable the camera entirely - lock screen or not using a MDM profile or restriction in the settings app.


Removing camera button on iPhone lock screen


The only countermeasure to that malicious behavior would be to not let the camera participate in iCloud photo stream so that once the camera had filled up the storage on the phone, the phone storage would be filled.

Bulk deleting images is something that's easy with a Mac and the Image Capture app.

In my opinion, this is a bug, and Apple should allow a restriction to prevent use of the camera from the lock screen. You could cut off the camera entirely using restrictions or an MDM profile, but that would prevent all use of the camera and not just from the locked state.

I would reach out to iCloud support and explain the data loss - they can point you to the upload restrictions and possibly tune them using your actual bad experience with Photo Stream.