If You Have An iPhone, Stop What You’re Doing And Turn Off FaceTime Because This Bug Is Creepy AF

Tyler Lastovich / Unsplash

News broke on Monday night of a truly creepy bug for iPhone users that allow a caller to hear full audio of the person they’re calling before they even pick up. It’s since been discovered that this bug also exposes video too, so a person calling on FaceTime Video can see video footage before the other person ever picks up the iPhone.

It’s really not that hard to replicate this bug at all, these are the four steps that are required to trigger the bug according to 9to5Mac:

1) Start a FaceTime Video call with an iPhone contact.
2) Whilst the call is dialing, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and tap Add Person.
3) Add your own phone number in the Add Person screen.
4) You will then start a group FaceTime call including yourself and the audio of the person you originally called, even if they haven’t accepted the call yet.

It’s that simple and as far as bugs go it really doesn’t get much creepier than this. Someone can just snoop in your conversations by activating this bug.

The damage potential here is real. You can listen in to soundbites of any iPhone user’s ongoing conversation without them ever knowing that you could hear them. Until Apple fixes the bug, it’s not clear how to defend yourself against this attack either aside from disabling FaceTime altogether.
As it stands, if your phone is ringing with an incoming FaceTime request, the person on the other end could be listening in.

What we have also found is that if the person presses the Power button from the lock screen, their video is also sent to the caller — unbeknownst to them. In this situation, the receiver can now hear your own audio, but they do not know they are transmitting their audio and video back to you. From their perspective, all they can see is accept and decline. (Another update: It seems there are other ways of triggering the video feed eavesdrop too.) (via)

So what do you do to stop this from happening? It’s as simple as going into your iPhone’s settings and turning off your FaceTime until Apple has time to respond to and fix this bug. You go Settings -> Phone -> FaceTime and toggle the green button to turn it off. Pretty simple.

According to 9to5Mac, Apple has already responded and said that they’ll be releasing a fix for this bug at some point this week.

Every time there’s an iPhone bug, I feel like at least one friend of mine tries to ‘get’ everyone so I fully expect to receive at least one FaceTime call from that person out of the blue today. That person knows who they are. They were the one texting around that weird ASCII figure a few years ago that was supposed to crash iPhones. This person thinks they’re hilarious.