Nowadays, it’s pretty hard to feel secure about our privacy. Even when the companies we deal with every day have to tell us what they want with our data, there’s still the very real possibility that somebody else will crash the party and gain access to it as well.
After all, it seems like there’s big news of a new, massive data breach every month and that’s bad enough without our tech showing us off to just anybody by accident.
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If you try to use Group FaceTime, you may discover that you don’t have that option right now.
According to The Guardian , that’s because Apple has disabled it until they can figure out how to make it stop being a little too free with your face.
If it was still available, you might find that calling someone could be more revealing than expected.
That’s because while their phone was still ringing, there’s a chance that you could both see and hear everything they had going on before they even answered you.
That’s because an incoming FaceTime call is now essentially turning their phone into a microphone.
While it may be strangely illuminating to hear what your friends really think of you, it’s also true that most people don’t like the idea of some rando listening in before they even have the choice to address them.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem you can solve just by being quick with the power button.
Tapping that button usually lets users silence an incoming call, but doing that is actually known to make this glitch worse.
That’s because hitting the power button while a FaceTime call is incoming somehow prompts your phone to broadcast video of you.
So until this glitch is fixed, people would essentially FaceTime whether they want to or not if tapping the power button is their usual response to getting a call.
So it’s no real surprise that Apple decided to disable all Group FaceTime functions for now.
As The Guardian reported, that seems to have stopped anybody from taking advantage of this bug any more than they already have.
As representatives from Apple told Reuters, they’re planning to release a software update fixing the bug later this week.
However, it’s unclear at this time whether any users that don’t update to iOS 12.2 when it comes out will have this protection in place.
While this would be a serious glitch for Apple at any moment, the timing of this bug is particularly embarrassing for them.
That’s because it happened to be exposed on the world’s Data Privacy Day, which began in 2007 to alert businesses and consumers alike about the importance of protecting privacy.
Oops.
h/t: The Guardian
