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from the look-for-people-in-trench-coats dept.
The BBC reports on a woman who was sent pictures of a penis via Apple AirDrop.
The victim received two pictures of an unknown man's penis on her phone via Apple's Airdrop sharing function.
Lorraine Crighton-Smith, 34, said she felt "violated" and reported it to the British Transport Police (BTP).
Supt Gill Murray said this particular crime was new to her force and urged people to report any other incidents.
Ms Crighton-Smith, who was travelling on a train in south London, told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme: "I had Airdrop switched on because I had been using it previously to send photos to another iPhone user - and a picture appeared on the screen of a man's penis, which I was quite shocked by.
The article later describes how to make sure that AirDrop is set to only allow pictured from known contacts.
Is this a major privacy issue or is it simply a case of a misconfigured device?
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:22PM
In Canada just recently, anti-abortion extremists were mailing out brochures with graphic images of aborted late-term fetuses. Since there was nothing enclosing them, you literally did not know what you were handling until you'd already seen the images.
Such is the case here: From a non-contact, a thumbnail *should* appear at the same time it asks if you want to accept it (it may auto-accept if it's a known contact, or between two of your own devices), but by which point it's already too late to say no. Although good from a UX standpoint, it's bad from a "do I get a choice not to see the contents" point of view.
There's not really a good way around this without reducing the default UX for intended use cases... change it to a text-only "accept pictures from user X (not in your contacts)?", blur the thumbnail, reduce thumbnail size... there's probably no right answer, and once again it's the 0.01% of the population who are fucking useless assholes that ruin it for the rest of us.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday August 18 2015, @05:32PM
If it helps, sociopaths make up a full 3% of the population, not just 0.01%. There's plenty around.