by Jason Snell
The cops think iOS 17’s NameDrop is dangerous
Turns out police departments are like some of my relatives: They see things on Facebook and uncritically pass them on without considering for one moment if what they’re posting is actually true.
Shira Ovide of the Washington Post covered the issue quite well in a recent newsletter, and Juli Clover of MacRumors wrote a nice summary of how an innocuous iOS 17 feature has been the latest target of unjustified panic:
There have been warnings about NameDrop popping up on Facebook. Police departments in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio, and other states have been suggesting that contact information can be shared “just by bringing your phones close together.” From the City of Chester Police Department in Ohio:
“IMPORTANT PRIVACY UPDATE: If you have an iPhone and have done the recent iOS 17 update, they have set a new feature called NameDrop defaulted to ON. This feature allows the sharing of your contact info just by bringing your phones close together. To shut this off go to Settings, General, AirDrop, Bringing Devices Together. Change to OFF.”
This is so bizarre. NameDrop is a feature that lets you AirDrop your contact information to someone else. For the feature to work, both phones need to be unlocked and one has to be placed directly over the other. The entire new tap-to-connect system is built to use physical proximity to confirm consent to sending or receiving data, replacing the old system in which you could leave your device open to AirDrop from all users—and receive all sorts of nasty unwanted stuff from nearby randos.1
Once the physical act of tapping is done—it takes a few seconds, there’s a prominent animation, it’s nothing that is going to happen accidentally—you are given the option to share your contact information with the other person, and get to choose which information is shared! If you only want to share a phone number and not your home address, you can do that! It’s entirely in the user’s control. (If someone nefarious approached you and wanted to steal your information, they’d be better off just grabbing your unlocked phone and running away with it.)
As Ovide wrote:
We spend too much time worrying about the wrong things in technology. And that is partly the fault of public officials and news organizations that can make anything sound scarier than it really is.
You also can’t die from touching fentanyl and nobody is poisoning or sticking razor blades in Halloween candy. But people believe this stuff, especially when it comes from an “authority” like the local police department.
I’m glad that so many sources are rushing to correct the original police department posts, but if you really want to get depressed, visit one and read the comments from all the people who are grateful for the misinformation. You’ll have to laugh to keep from crying.
- At Oracle Park in San Francisco, I was once AirDropped a photo of Dick Van Dyke, with the text, “You just got an unsolicited Dick pic.” ↩