New Chinese puzzle for Apple. The Beijing city judicial office welcomed a “technological breakthrough”: authorities can now identify users of AirDrop, the iPhone’s file transfer system.
Apple poses as the white knight of confidentiality and respect for private life, and the manufacturer is putting in the means to maintain its rank. This is not to everyone's taste, and especially not to intelligence agencies around the world who seek, and sometimes find, ways to “break” the protections put in place by the manufacturer.
Apple caught in the crossfire
This is the case of the judicial office of the city of Beijing, which announced that police now had the ability to identify AirDrop users, more precisely the telephone numbers and email addresses of file senders. The authorities have already identified several “suspects” using this method, without specifying whether any arrests had been made.
This iPhone log decryption technique is particularly worrying, it “ improves the efficiency of case resolution and prevents the spread of inappropriate remarks as well as potential bad influences “. Since the major protests in Hong Kong in 2019, the Chinese government has had AirDrop in its crosshairs: protesters used this function a lot to quickly and discreetly share pro-democracy documents. In essence, for the Chinese government, AirDrop has become a censorship circumvention tool.
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And this is surely why Apple reduced the operating time of AirDrop at the end of 2022. The function is only active for 10 minutes, before being automatically deactivated. Previously, AirDrop remained active all the time (other options remain available to completely disable AirDrop and limit it to known contacts).
A charitable explanation for this restriction on AirDrop usage was that it effectively limits spamming. But then, why initially limited it to China alone? It was later extended to the rest of the world.
Read Apple will limit AirDrop activation time to reduce spam… and please Chinese censors?
In any case, this method of unblocking AirDrop will undoubtedly push Apple to tighten the bolts in a future update of iOS. Until the next Beijing hack.
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Source :
Bloomberg