Uber app can secretly record your iPhone screen, security researcher reveals.
Friday, October 6, 2017 IST
Uber may have been secretly recording your iPhone screen, even when the app is closed. Will Strafach, a New York-based security researcher, discovered that the taxi hailing app had received a special permission from Apple to access the screen-recording feature. The company, however, rejected the security breach fears, stating the code was installed to improve the experience on Apple Watch version of the app. It is worth understanding that Apple gives “entitlements”, a code to developers for enabling access to key features of an iPhone. Access to the screen-recording feature, however, is not available to all developers. Strafach claims that no other third-party apps except Uber had this special privilege. The permission is known as “com.apple.private.allow-explicit-graphics-priority” and allows developers to access and alter parts iPhone’s memory that contains data on pixel and display.
For now, there is no concrete evidence that Uber actually took advantage of this access. The company claims it has now removed the API (aplication program interface) from the app.
“It’s not connected to anything else in our current codebase and the diff [sic] to remove it is already being pushed into production. This API would allow maps to render on your phone in the background and then be sent to your Apple Watch,” an Uber spokesperson is quoted as saying by Cnet.
“Subsequent updates to Apple Watch and our app removed this dependency, so we’re removing the API completely,” added the spokesperson.
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