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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:10PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:50PM (#224641)

    Clearly its a security and privacy issue if you can just receive information from unknown devices left and right.

    Except that its the intended usage of the app in question. If I configure an app to receive pictures from anyone (like the person in question here has done), and some random person sends me a picture, exactly as I have configured the app to accept, then there is on issue except for user idiocy. An non-intrusive, non-malicious app working as exactly designed and as intended cannot be a security or privacy issue.