(WSAV) – If you ever thought someone might be spying on you through your iPhone, it turns out you may not have been paranoid after all.
Tuesday, Apple announced it had disabled the iPhone group app which was allowing someone to actually hear audio from another person’s phone even if that person had not even answered that phone.
Tammy Poston from Tweaks by Geeks agreed with me it was all a little creepy. “Very creepy so it’s good they caught it,” she said.
Poston told me that many of us would “be surprised at the number of her customers already coming in with concerns someone is watching them over their phone or laptop.”
She said the issue surrounded the group use of FaceTime (which was introduced last fall and touted as a way for conference type business calls among many parties.) She said if you FaceTime your mom every once in a while it’s probably not an issue but she also advised anyone with concerns to disable FaceTime on their own phone.
“I think that we all have to protect ourselves and how do we do that? We become educated about the kind of devices and the kind of apps we are using,” said Poston.
Poston says when you download an app, you are often asked if the app can “capture voice or photos of video.” But she says if you’re downloading a game there is no need for that kind of app to be able to capture that personal information. “We can protect ourselves by becoming educated,” she told me.
Poston believes Apple has acted quickly by acknowledging the flaw and promising to fix it within a few days.
If you want to disable FaceTime on your own phone:
1) Go to Settings (looks like a wheel and then click on it
2) Find FaceTime on the list (looks like a little camera on a green square background and click on that)
3) You will see FaceTime on the left side of the screen and on the right side a little circle with green in it (which means it’s on.) Tap circle until the green goes away and all you see is white. That means it is deactivated.
