And that’s a big “10-7” (radio lingo for “out of service”) for the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app after the company reportedly disabled the feature following the discovery of a security vulnerability that could allow eavesdropping on iPhones.
According to TechCrunch, Apple learned of the problem through a disclosure on its “report a vulnerability” portal. The flaw reportedly could enable one party to listen in on another party’s iPhone without consent.
The report cited a statement from Apple: “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.”
“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,” Apple’s statement continued.
Gloss