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Apple discovered a bug that allowed people to use an Apple Watch to listen to conversations through another person’s iPhone via the Watch’s “Walkie-Talkie” feature. Apple has disabled the feature until it can release a fix for the bug.
The Walkie-Talkie feature was introduced in watchOS 5, which rolled out last September.
“We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue,” Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible.”
Apple said that it is “not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it.”
“We take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent.”
A similar iPhone bug was found in January 2019, when a teenager discovered a FaceTime bug that allowed someone with an iPhone to place a call to another iPhone and listen through the microphone, even if the recipient hadn’t answered the call. Apple quickly fixed that bug.