Facetime Bug That Lets People Spy on You!

Imagine a bug that lets you hear or even see through someone else's iPhone, even if they haven't answered your phone call. A few years ago, this happened.

I recently wrote about How a Trillion-Dollar Company got Bugged — The Apple Map Apocalypse. It created quite a buzz around the network. People couldn't believe that a giant, wealthy tech company introduced an ominous and seemingly careless bug in the core software of the most critical kind of computer on Earth.

Well, Apple just hit the 'three trillion-dollar mark,' and today we'll talk about yet another bug that got Apple a lot of negative publicity.

A significant bug was discovered in Facetime and spread virally over social media. The bug lets you call anyone with Facetime and immediately hear the audio coming from their phone - before the person on the other end has accepted or rejected the incoming call.

Naturally, it posed a pretty big privacy problem as you could listen in on any iOS user, even though it still rings like a regular call, so you wouldn't have the slightest hint about it happening. The next part was even scarier; you could even get access to the receiver's camera without them knowing about it.

9to5Mac did an experiment and released a report, and here's how the facetime bug works :

• Start a Facetime video call with an iPhone contact.
• While the call is dialing, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and tap Add Person.
• Add your phone number to the Add person screen.
• You will then start a group FaceTime call, including yourself and the audio of the person you originally called, even if they haven't accepted the call.

It looked like the other person had joined the group chat, but it will still be ringing on the lock screen on their actual device.

Scary! But True.

When Apple found out that the vulnerability was real, it temporarily disabled the group facetime feature till Apple rolled out a fix in the next update.

Apple has primarily risen above this situation of intense competitive activity. The company makes most of its money from hardware sales, not advertising, so it has little reason to collect or cheat you out of your data. One of the main reasons Apple is known for privacy is that they don't need to sell data to third-party vendors to get some extra cash.

However, this incident and a few others do tamper with the 'privacy' aspect of the whole company. When a company of this scale makes a hole, they sure do fill it up quickly and without making a lot of headlines.

Hardware and software systems are more complex than ever, and bugs are bound to arise. Most are accidental, the unexpected combination of instructions given by humans to computers, which do as told. But given Apple's billions of dollars in the bank and thousands of engineers, the public will lean hard on its promise of trust, which Tim Cook, the CEO, has used to distinguish his company from competitors such as Google and Facebook.

There's not much one person can do about things like these. You can obscure your laptop camera, but if you want to lead a typical day and productive life in the world today, you can't tape over your whole iPhone. However, as a developer, you can check for bugs before making them public. Software Testing is necessary, and something like Tuskr - A Test Management Software ( https://tuskr.app/ ) can come in handy.