Police around the world are issuing warnings on Facebook over Apple’s new NameDrop feature, and telling people to turn it off, but these warnings are just needless scaremongering – don’t worry!
Spurious reports are suggesting your data will be shared with others when your iPhone is near someone else’s, but would privacy-obsessed Apple really enable such a feature without serious safeguards or?
Of course not, Here’s Apple’s video on how NameDrop works – you’ll see that you need to choose what is shared, or whether you want to share anything at all. And of course, you can turn NameDrop off if you want to.
Here’s Apple’s official video:
Here’s one news report from Yahoo and The Independent, which backs up the notion that these warnings are worthless.
MacDailyNews has the Washington Post quoting a security researcher from security company Sophos stating the warnings are “hysteria” and “nonsense.”
Again, you need to have your iPhone right next to someone else’s whereupon you see the cool warping animation and hear a techno sound – and you can do this between Apple Watches and iPhones, too.
But before all of that can happen – your phone needs to be unlocked! So someone just walking by next to you isn’t going to initiate the transfer of details, which you then need to authorise anyway.
To turn off NameDrop on your iPhone and Apple Watch, go to Settings > General > AirDrop and, under “START SHARING BY”, toggle the “Bringing Devices Together” option to be off, so the green light is turned to grey.
Here is an example of the news stories out there, except this one has a security expert explaining it isn’t the huge deal some authorities are making it out to be:
