Following the furore surrounding a FaceTime bug that appeared last week, Apple have released an apology. However, with a proposed class action lawsuit in Canada and one already in the pipeline in Texas, it may be too little, too late. And given the serious breach of privacy attached to the bug, it’s highly likely that there are many more lawsuits still to come.
The bug in question allowed one person to call another via FaceTime before sliding up on the interface and entering their own number. This then automatically allowed the caller to gain access to audio from the other person’s device without them accepting the call and in some instances, the user was even able to access video.
As a temporary service-side solution in a bid to limit any damage, Apple disabled Group FaceTime as they got to work on a permanent fix. The issue was set to be resolved last week but the task has been carried into this week. Apple gave its thanks to the Thompson family, the users responsible for reporting the bug and claimed they are committed to improving the process by which it receives and escalates such reports in order to resolve bugs at a much faster pace.
Apple’s apology statement was as follows:
“We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week. We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug. We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.
We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix. We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible. We take the security of our products extremely seriously and we are committed to continuing to earn the trust Apple customers place in us.”
