krreagan2

I agree that this is egregious!

However, most apps need information from the user to be sent back to an apps server (especially travel sites) and it is extremely difficult for a third party (Apple) to discern what is valid data an what is not valid data in thousands of apps. Most of the information that is sent (passport numbers, CC numbers, user selected options...) are valid data to be transferred back to the apps servers in some form. It's only in the context of the data not being used for the transactions itself or that the data is being transmitted in the clear, that there are privacy issues. Apple cannot control the data once it is outside it's device except through contractual agreements (and we have seen how companies ignore these agreements).

If these apps are using the data outside the bounds of their agreement with Apple and/or the customer, then Apple should ban the offending company from selling apps in the app store for a year. Putting one medium profile company on-the-ropes for a year will end the practice pretty quick I would imagine!. The problem is Apple is not hard enough on the apps that do violate their terms of use. A day or two for Facebook and a few hours for Google!! barley a slap on the wrist since these were only for internal apps. They should have shutdown their public facing apps for an entire day! I would gladly go without any app that I use for a day to punish an app company for abusing my data.

So 99.9% of all reports of a bug are either nonsense or trivial from a security point of view. This one is reported to be found by a 14yo and so an Apple rep put it in the appropriate pile of things (queue) to be looked into. Based on the fact that most bug reports from customers over state the seriousness of the bug -they- find... a week is not unreasonable for an unverified (at the time) bug. Even companies like Apple have limited resources and while, in hind site, this looks bad, I can't blame Apple for not stopping the world and putting $1B into fixing it ASAP when it also has probably 10,000 other bug reports in the same queue to filter...

At the worst this is a failure of a rep not classifying a bugs severity level correctly,  and not Apple as a company taking it lightly!  How detailed was the initial report? Detailed enough for Apple to reproduce it easily? or just "audio leaked during Facetime call" with no detailed procedure attached!, As a SW developer, one of the hardest things to do is reproduce an error that our professional testers report to us, never mind Joe-Blow on the internet(s).

Once Apple discovered the severity of the bug they took the appropriate action... Shutting down a new and highly hyped feature to great negative press! Think Google or Facebook would have taken these steps? I think NOT!

Apple will take a hit on this, but in reality, I don't think their reaction (time or effort) is all that unreasonable.

At this point 5G is just a smoke screen from the wireless providers trying to get the hype machine into overdrive.

I don't see a big need for 5g like I did for LTE when it came out. I have not  really noticed many "slow" connections including while streaming. The times I do notice a slow down it was not due to the speed but from a lack of coverage! Maybe in 4-5 years it will be relevant, but not yet! So it is a non-issue for my next phone purchase (Fall 2019). While I'm not a bleeding edge tech person, I do like my tech! I just don't see a need yet!