— nic nguyen (@itsnicolenguyen) January 29, 2019
Recently a post went viral on 9to5mac about a FaceTime breach which allowed you to listen and see the person you were calling without them knowing or accepting the call. But this post is not about the bug itself, it’s about Apple’s response.
On 19th January Michele Thompson’s 14 year old son made this discovery and a day later his mom tried reporting the bug to Apple. She sent a video, emailed, faxed them, made posts about it on Facebook and Twitter, but to no avail. Apple decided to disable Group FaceTime calls after more than a week after the report made by Michele T, on Monday 28th of January. They announced to have it fixed later this week.
The bug is now branded as FacePalm and got pretty popular so beware what you say when someone calls you. On top of that, a lawsuit have been filed towards Apple by a Houston Texas-Based Lawyer who claims that the exploit enabled an unknown entity to eavesdrop on his private conversation with a client.
This puts Apple in a pretty bad light, since they are pretty good at boasting how secure their products are and how they care about their customers. During the CES 2019 Conference Apple put up a poster which said:
Whatever happens in you iPhone, stays in your iPhone.
If an exploit like that went through testing and got released it makes me wonder how many more infectious bugs can be out there to discover and used for a wrong cause.
sources:
https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/apple-knew-about-facetime-eavesdrop-issue-since-last-week-faces-a-lawsuit-because-of-the-bug/articleshow/67773411.cms
https://www.nytim es.com/2019/01/29/technology/facetime-glitch-apple.html?ref=oembed
https://9to5 mac.com/2019/01/29/apple-facetime-eavesdropping-lawsuit/
Hm, actually this bug was super weird, I mean that it is quite usual that technical bugs appear and that is totally normal but this particular bug allowed people with lets say “bad intentions” to eavesdrop on others, for example politcs and governments. I dont like this kind of “suspicious” approach, but it’s a little weird that while Huawei is accused of cooperating with China by spying with their technology now it turns out that Apple had this FaceTime bug and had it for a whole week. What do you think?
Indeed it seems pretty suspicious. Actually it’s not about the bug itself but how they handled it. Why would they ignore the reports and handle it only after it went viral. In effect the bug was alive for a whole week letting people eavesdrop on anyone they want. It almost seems as if they introduced a backdoor, as many products have, but then again it seems to easy and obvious to be a backdoor. The whole approach to the situation was unprofessional – leaving the company vulnerable to a bad reputation and potential lawsuits.
I am very surprised by this. It is suspicious the way that Apple dealt with the issue, but the biggest surprise is that such a thing even exists. As mentioned before, it really is paranoia inducing not knowing that I am safe from such things, and especially not knowing what other bugs are in in our everyday gadgets. After all, our phones store basically our entire lives. Therefore, I consider Samsung definitely better, however, perhaps something like this can also be hidden in other phones.