New York AG, governor investigating Apple's response to FaceTime bug

On Wednesday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and new Attorney General Letitia James told the state was probing Apple Inc’s failure to warn consumers about a FaceTime bug that lets iPhones users see and hear others before they accept the video call.

The bug, which Reuters has been able to imitate, allows an iPhone user making a call using Apple’s FaceTime video-calling feature to hear audio from the recipient’s phone even if the call has not gone through.

Cuomo said in a statement, “We need a full accounting of the facts to confirm businesses are abiding by New York consumer protection laws and to help make sure this type of privacy breach does not happen again.”

The statement said Cuomo and James would investigate Apple’s slow response and cited media reports that a user had made the firm aware of the bug more than a week earlier it took action to disable the FaceTime feature.

On Monday Apple told it was conscious of the problem and had come up with a fix that would be released in a software update by the end of this week. The firm was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.

The bug looks to rely on Apple’s group video-calling feature, which Apple launched in the month of October. In certain situations, FaceTime also broadcast both video and audio from the recipient’s phone, according to the reports of technology news website the Verge, stated on Monday.

Cuomo on Monday issued a consumer alert about the bug and persuaded users to disable the app.