Add Yourself
Someone found a bug in FaceTime group calls. You’d start a call and swipe up to add another person, but instead of entering their number you’d add your own. Now you’re listening in on the other person’s call without them knowing. Video works too. Just like that.
The timing is what makes it stupid. Apple spends most of their time telling you they’re different from the other tech companies, that they actually care about privacy, that your data is encrypted and safe and they don’t listen. That’s their whole pitch. And meanwhile anyone could tap into your calls if they knew this one trick.
The feature had been around since late 2018, so the bug could’ve been sitting there almost from the beginning. Someone could’ve been listening to you for months. Not as part of an investigation or anything official. Just because they wanted to. An ex, a parent, whoever had it out for you.
Apple killed group FaceTime when the bug came out, just turned it off. But then it came out that they’d apparently known about it for a week before doing anything. A week of leaving an eavesdropping exploit alive while people were using the feature.
The thing that got me is how fast all those promises about privacy just evaporate. One bug. One little interaction between features that goes wrong, and suddenly your data is safe
means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t take a sophisticated attack. Doesn’t take hacking anything. You just add yourself to a call. That’s the depth of the protection they’re selling you.