EFF Criticizes iOS 11’s ‘Misleading’ Bluetooth And WiFi Toggles

Imagine this: you’re at home and you flip the switch to turn off your lights, and while the switch is flipped to the off position and your lights appear to be off, they’re really not. Actually what’s happening is that they’re still secretly drawing power, it’s just that you don’t know about it, and the only way to truly turn them off is to turn them off in the mains.

That’s kind of the situation with iOS 11’s Control Center controls for Bluetooth and WiFi. You might have heard how toggling them off via Control Center doesn’t actually turn them off. Instead users need to go directly into their Settings app to turn it off properly, and this is something that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) isn’t too pleased about and are going as far as calling it a misleading practice with potential security and privacy concerns.

The EFF writes on its website, “When a phone is designed to behave in a way other than what the UI suggests, it results in both security and privacy problems. A user has no visual or textual clues to understand the device’s behavior, which can result in a loss of trust in operating system designers to faithfully communicate what’s going on. Since users rely on the operating system as the bedrock for most security and privacy decisions, no matter what app or connected device they may be using, this trust is fundamental.”

For those learning about this for the first time, the reason Apple has done this is because they don’t want the disabling of those features to affect the connection of other Apple products or features, like Apple Watch, AirDrop, AirPlay, the Apple Pencil, and so on. We’re not sure if Apple plans to respond to the EFF’s criticisms and make changes, but what do you guys think? Should they?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iOS, ios 11, Privacy, Security, Social Hit