Apple Watch’s Walkie Talkie Feature Disabled Due To Eavesdropping Flaw

One of the new features introduced in last year’s watchOS update came in the form of Walkie Talkie. As its name suggests, it allowed users to push-to-talk to talk to each other using their Apple Watch, kind of like how it was back in the day with those Dick Tracy comics and movies. However, it seems that the feature has since been disabled.

According to Apple, it appears that they have come across a potential flaw with the feature that would allow a user to listen to another user’s iPhone conversation without their consent. The feature has since been temporarily disabled while Apple is working on a fix, so until then, users won’t be able to use it.

The company wrote, “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. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are 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.”

This seems to be slightly reminiscent of a problem from earlier this year in which a bug with FaceTime allowed users to spy on the person they were calling without their knowledge.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Gadgets
Tags: Apple Watch, iPhone, Privacy, Smartwatch, Wearable Tech