Apple Compensates Tucson Teen for Discovering a Facetime Security Flaw
photo from google images
February 14, 2019
Grant Thompson, a freshman at Catalina High School, was awarded a sum of money for finding a glitch in FaceTiming and an additional “gift toward his education,” his mother, Michele Thompson told the Arizona Daily Star. Grant discovered the security glitch last month while coordinating a game of “Fortnite” with his friends, Michele stated.
As he was setting up a group chat Facetime call, he noticed that he could hear one of his friends talking before that friend answered the call.“Everyone could hear what was happening, what was going on in the vicinity of the first friend’s phone … so (Grant) started talking to this first friend,” Thompson said. “And then the first friend said, ‘Grant? How can you hear me? I haven’t answered the phone!’ And (Grant) looked at his phone, and it looked like it was still ringing.”
Grant called his friends, mom, and sister multiple times to see if it was a mistake, and it was not. According to Ms. Thompson, every time her son called, the glitch worked. She decided then to notify Apple. It took a few weeks to get in touch with Apple but they still did not reply.
She posted vaguely about her son’s discovery on Facebook and Twitter, tagging Apple support and Apple CEO Tim Cook in her various posts. A couple of weeks passed, and she still hadn’t heard back. So his mother looked a little deeper and found an email address for Apple’s product security department and their general counsel’s fax number. She sent both parties a message with her law firm’s letterhead.
Still, she heard nothing. She called Apple support and was told to register online as an Apple developer so she could submit a bug report, even though she isn’t a developer. She followed their instructions and emailed the product security team again. Thompson didn’t hear back from Apple until after national media outlets broke the news about the FaceTime glitch and traced the report back to her original tweets.
Apple reached out only a couple of hours before her and Grant’s first media interview with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. Grant who is only 14 years old, will use the entire fund Apple rewarded him for his college education.
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