A Bug Found in Apple’s proprietary video and audio calling app Facetime exclusive for Apple users let callers eavesdrop on the people they were calling, whether or not the person on the other end picked up or was even aware a call was coming in. The process isn’t exactly easy, involving adding your own number to a Group FaceTime call after dialing, but it’s not something out of the realm of inadvertently implementing it either.
But the question remains: How did it happen in the first place? Group FaceTime was delayed from the initial iOS 12 launch, so it’s not like Apple rushed things. And while it’s not an easy bug to duplicate, it’s also not a particularly intricate one, so Apple’s engineers should have spotted it before it released or at some point over the past three months since it’s been live.
It’s something of a trend at Apple that should have gone out of style by now. Last year, Apple dealt with so many bugs it promised it was “auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again.” A year later, it seems as though Apple hasn’t actually learned anything from its mistakes.
The reality is Apple is the richest company in the world and privacy is primarily a PR move. While I believe that privacy does matter to Tim Cook and Apple, I also think the company’s profits and PR matter more and assuming Apple knew about the bug before last night, it was hoping to skate by without needing to publicly disclose the FaceTime bug. And it may have been knowingly putting its customers at risk for weeks, if not months.
The irony of all this is that the bug was discovered on Data Privacy Day, which was marked with a tweet by CEO Tim Cook saying “The dangers are real and the consequences are too important.” It’s hard to argue with those words, especially when it’s your own iPhone that poses the danger.
