British police are investigating a new type of crime, cyber-flashing, in which a person receives a sexual photo from a person nearby using Apple’s Airdrop.
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So how can you avoid receiving unsolicited photos via Airdrop on your iPhone?
According to the BBC, the British Transport Police are investigating the first known case of “cyber-flashing”, when a 34-year-old woman received a few indecent photos from a fellow commuter as she traveled to work.
Lorraine CrightonovervallenSmith instructed the authorities the woman seemed “violated” the present he saw a couple of photograph of a given cyberflasher’s penile coming out on her iPhone’s display screen.
AirDrop feature is designed to share pictures between friends easily but at the same time it can be used by anyone to send images to people in close vicinity. Even if the receiver rejects the photo, they are still shown an uncensored preview of the image.
‘So I decline the image instinctively and another picture appeared.
Crighton-Smith explained how she received the images.
Supt Gill Murray said the force had dealt with cases involving Bluetooth but an incident image via Airdrop was “new to us”.
Mark James, ESET’s security specialist, said: “AirDrop is not turned on by default, but it’s easy to set AirDrop to receive from “Everyone”, and then forget all about it”, he said.
It’s definitely worth turning off AirDrop when you’re not using it or, at least, keeping it limited to ‘contacts only’. She wondered whether there was any kind of gratification involved when sending naked pictures to a flawless stranger. “I felt violated, it was a very unpleasant thing to have forced upon my screen”, she said. The sender wasn’t someone who knew or in her phone’s contacts list, so it could have been possible that she had deactivated a setting in the service that allows only people in her contacts list to send files through Airdrop.
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She added: “I was also anxious about who else might have been a recipient, it might have been a child, someone more vulnerable than me”. Swipe up from the bottom of your screen and get the pull-up menu where the Flashlight and Bluetooth settings hide.
