Technology giant Apple once again has come under fire from the tech community for a bug in their iPhone’s FaceTime app. The bug reportedly allows users to listen to the other user’s conversation in group function, even if they don’t answer the call. The worst part is, the bug also turns on the camera of the phone if the other user called uses power button to turn off the screen.
The bug was discovered by an Arizona-based teenager, whose mother informed the company about the issue. However, Apple took almost a week to disable group calling function in FaceTime.
How dangerous the bug is? The bug hasn’t had any significant impact in India, as the number of FaceTime users is negligible. However, for the US and some European countries, it has been an absolute nightmare.
While Apple has issued an official statement saying that it would roll out an update to fix the glitch, the entire episode has put a question mark over the data security in Apple devices.
Apple CEO Tim Cook in October last year had said that privacy of users’ data was the prime responsibility of his company. He had also called for new digital security laws in the US for the purpose. But now, his company itself has caused a major breach in privacy of its consumers. More shocking for the tech community has been the slow response from the company to an issue that was extremely serious.
President of Sudo Security Group and iOS security researcher Will Strafach has called it an unfortunate event caused due to bad programming logic coded into the process for group FaceTime handling. He however, could not provide the exact cause behind the ‘snooping bug’.
Apple Inc. that became word’s first company to reach trillion dollars mark last year, has seen a drastic fall in its shares prices since the launch of its flagship phones iPhone Xs and Xs Max owing much to the plateau in the smart phone market. The recent bug is only going to increase the problems for Apple.
