New York’s attorney general said Wednesday it would investigate Apple’s response to a bug in its FaceTime video-chat app that let people make a call and hear audio from the other end before the call was picked up.
Michele Thompson, the mother of the Arizona boy who discovered the bug, said she first started warning Apple about it more than a week before the company took action.
“Thompson said her efforts included multiple tweets, Facebook messages, emails to Apple and calls to the support line over the last week,” tech website C-Net reported Tuesday.
“On Jan. 22, she also sent the company’s general counsel a fax about the bug, with her law firm’s letterhead on top. And on Jan. 25 she uploaded a video to YouTube, demonstrating the flaw, and sent it to Apple multiple times.”
Apple did not acknowledge the existence of the flaw until reports about it went viral Tuesday. The firm disabled the group-call FaceTime feature and said it would fix it this week, Digital Trends reported Wednesday.
New York’s attorney general, in announcing its probe, cited the importance of privacy in private communications.
“We’re launching an investigation into Apple’s failure to warn consumers about the FaceTime privacy breach & their slow response to addressing the issue,” the attorney general’s office tweeted.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, a Texas lawyer filed suit against Apple over the bug, tech website Ars Technica reported Wednesday. Larry Williams said in the lawsuit that he had updated his iPhone to obtain the group FaceTime feature, not to become a victim of “unsolicited eavesdropping,” according to the website.
Williams said he had been “undergoing a private deposition with a client when this defective product breach allowed for the recording of a private deposition.”
