Photo: Apple
Enterprise security company Sevco has discovered a privacy bug in Apple’s new iPhone Mirroring feature.
For those new to the feature, it lets users access and interact wirelessly with their iPhones on their Macs. With it, you can receive notifications from your iPhone on your Mac and even use your iPhone’s apps on your Mac. It’s easily one of my favourite new features of macOS Sequoia.
However, in a blog post, Sevco details how the way iPhone Mirroring interacts with macOS might pose a privacy risk for users who use this feature with their office-issued Macs.
When you use iPhone Mirror, “app stubs” for iOS are created on the Mac and you can find them in a specific directory on the Mac. These app stubs contain metadata of the iOS apps, which includes icons, application names, dates, and file descriptions. It doesn’t contain any executable code, but it’s enough for macOS to treat them as installed applications.
According to Sevco, this can be a problem because many enterprise security and IT management tools routinely scan issued devices for installed software. When doing so, these apps can show up and be visible to IT departments.
This can be a problem for users because apps that they might use in private could now become visible to their employers without their knowledge or consent. This can be a concern especially if you have dating or health-related apps that might reveal sensitive personal information.
Sevco has reported this to Apple, who has identified the cause of the issue and is working on a fix. In the meantime, users working on an office-issued Mac should definitely avoid iPhone Mirroring on their devices.
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