We love Apple AirPods, whether to use them on our iPhone or on any other mobile, tablet or computer, whether or not it is from Apple. However, these have a prominent privacy flaw that, while it might not be serious in principle, could make someone else know your location. How and why does this happen? Here we tell you the details.
The problem of the iPhone Find My AirPods app
The well-known cybersecurity expert, Chema Alonso, has recently revealed a major AirPods vulnerability that he has named ” AirPodsSpy “. In a video published on his YouTube channel and an article published on his blog, he explains in detail this problem that has existed in our devices since the first generation of Apple headphones and that we had never noticed, however.
The ” Search ” app present on Apple devices, including the iPhone iOS, allows us to locate our devices associated with an Apple ID, making it an excellent tool to find them in case of loss or theft. However, it can be counterproductive with AirPods, since if someone else links our headphones to their iPhone, they could always know where we are if we carry these headphones.
Just by pressing the button on the AirPods case, they can be linked to several iPhone regardless of whether they are not associated with the same Apple ID. From that moment you can access the “Search” app from any of them and see in detail where the AirPods are. In this way a third person could know our location after having linked our headphones and we did not realize it, since there is no place where it is specified to how many Apple IDs these headphones are linked.
It should be noted that this also happens when AirPods are linked to any other Apple device such as a Mac or an iPad , since in these we also find the “Search” app, from which the location of the headphones can be accessed.
Is there a solution to this problem?
We understand that this privacy problem may not be as important as other vulnerabilities detected in recent years, since it is unusual for us to often link our headphones with other iPhone and other devices. However, the negative part of this is that anyone with access to our headphones could associate it with their mobile and thus track them through their own device and we will have no way of knowing.
At the moment, the best solution is to be cautious and take this problem into account when allowing a friend or family member to link your iPhone to our AirPods. Although these can be trusted, it does not seem pleasant that they can know our location at all times. The definitive solution to this failure will have to come with Apple and a future firmware update for the AirPods and another software update for our iPhone. Perhaps in some way they can make us only have access to their location from the iPhone to which we first associated the headphones.