Sometimes you have to disable a feature, especially if it can potentially violate your user’s privacy.
Apple recently disabled the Apple Watch’s Walkie Talkie app due to a glitch that could potentially allow a user to eavesdrop on another iPhone without their knowledge or consent.
The company offered the following comment:
“We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible.”
The company added that there no known reports of the bug being exploited for eavesdropping.
“Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent,” the company said.
This represents the second such eavesdropping bug for Apple in the past six months. In February, apple fixed a bug that allowed users to eavesdrop on other iPhone users before a FaceTime chat began.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via ABC News and TechCrunch