New Chinese puzzle for Apple. The Beijing Municipal Justice Department hailed a “technological breakthrough”: Authorities can now identify users of AirDrop, the iPhone’s file transfer system.
Apple presents itself as a white knight of confidentiality and respect for private life, and the manufacturer does everything it can to maintain its position. This is not to everyone's taste and certainly not to the taste of secret services around the world, which seek and sometimes find ways to “break” the protection measures put in place by the manufacturer.
Apple was caught in the crossfire
This is the case of the Beijing Municipal Judicial Office, which reported this The police now had the opportunity to identify AirDrop users, more precisely the phone numbers and email addresses of the file senders. The authorities have already identified several “suspects” in this way, without specifying whether any arrests were made.
This iPhone log decryption technique is particularly concerning because it “improves the efficiency of case resolution and prevents the spread of inappropriate comments and potential harmful influences.” Since the major protests in Hong Kong in 2019, the Chinese government has set its sights on AirDrop: protesters often used the feature to quickly and discreetly share pro-democracy documents. Essentially, AirDrop has become a tool for the Chinese government to circumvent censorship.
iPhone 15 at the best price Base price: €969
View more offers
And that's certainly why Apple reduced AirDrop's uptime at the end of 2022. The feature is only active for 10 minutes and then automatically deactivates. Previously, AirDrop remained active all the time (there are still other options available to disable AirDrop completely and limit it to known contacts).
A benign explanation for this restriction on AirDrop usage was that it effectively limits spam. But why limit it to China to begin with? Later it was expanded to the rest of the world.
Read that Apple will limit AirDrop activation time to reduce spam… and Chinese censorship please?
In any case, this method of unlocking AirDrop will undoubtedly prompt Apple to tighten the screws on a future update to iOS. Until the next Beijing hack.
🔴 In order not to miss any news from 01net, follow us on Google News and WhatsApp.
Source: Bloomberg