Disable AirDrop to Avoid Losing Your Phone Number
You are more likely to bump into AirDrop in a public place when you block a random stranger from sending you a strange image or greeting. But if you ever need to transfer a file between devices – maybe it’s a funny photo you just took with your friends at a bar – wait until you get home for security reasons.
According to recent reports , an attacker may already have more details about you than you are likely willing to give, simply because Bluetooth is enabled on your device. If you launch AirDrop or use a handy iOS feature that allows you to share your Wi-Fi password with a friend, an attacker could also extract your full phone number.
To Apple’s credit, this is more of a problem with the technology behind these features – Bluetooth LE – than any vulnerability in AirDrop itself. And there are several ways to solve this problem, as Hexway notes on his blog:
“This behavior has more to do with ecosystem performance than vulnerability. We found this behavior in iOS versions starting from 10.3.1 (including the iOS 13 beta).
Unfortunately, the only thing you can do is turn off Bluetooth on your device. But we also noticed that older devices (like everything before the iPhone 6s) do not send BLE messages continuously, even if they have an updated version of the OS. They only send a limited number of messages (for example, when you go to the Wi-Fi settings menu), probably Apple is doing this to conserve battery power on older devices. “
This is great advice if you don’t have external devices to connect to your phone, such as a pair of wireless headphones or an Apple Watch. If you do, then you probably want to leave Bluetooth on, even if that means someone can easily get your “phone status, Wi-Fi status, buffer availability, OS version, etc.” says Hexaway describes.
This is not too bad as this is all relatively trivial information that doesn’t really affect your day-to-day privacy. I would still restrict the use of AirDrop and Wi-Fi in public places. While it’s unlikely that someone will sit there with a laptop and wait to get your phone number out, there’s no reason you can’t wait to share information via Airdrop until you find yourself in a more private place. Otherwise, just send a text or email.