If someone airdrops you an image can you trace who sent it?
[search terms to find more detail: bluejacking, airdrop settings, airdrop privacy issues, airdrop trolling]
It all started with this question: “if someone airdrops you an image can you trace who sent it?” It turned out that several students in the library were receiving images which some were finding offensive. IT were asked if the ‘culprits’ could be tracked. We were asked to find out the student IDs of 2 students who were on computers at the time the issue occurred with the assumption that these could be the ones sending the offending images. As trolling people via Airdrop is the prank call of today (Go on, google it), it is not surprising that if your phone is open to all you may get images that offend.
From a learning technology perpective this is a teaching moment not one to track culprits. The reason students or staff in the library are receiving unwanted images is because they need to learn about privacy settings on their phones.
A phone with a setting that is open to anyone nearby, is the equivalent of choosing to go for coffee with any stranger no matter how suspicious they look. If you wan to avoid dodgy characters in your home, don’t keep you front door open. Only invite your friends in and make sure the door is locked unless you open it. (In what follows, make sure you click on the underlined text as it will take you to tutorials if you want a step by step guide).
Airdrop is set to invite only your friends in by default: contacts only. Apple’s briefing tells us: ‘Users can also choose to use AirDrop to share with everyone, or turn off the feature entirely.’ Android phones have their very own version of AirDrop, the ‘Nearby Share’ app. Their ‘Device Visibility’ allows you choose among three options: all contacts, some contacts and hidden. It is a little more complex to set up than Airdrop on the iPhone but there are plenty of tutorials online, this tutorial is a little older but is more detailed.
Yet, even if you have left a setting that is more public than private, you will still get a notification that a file is being sent which you have to accept on your phone. So, how come our students managed to be offended by a stranger sending them offensive photos? Here is another teaching moment: far too often we are distracted when we use our phones. Software generally operates on habit, humans act on the habit of clicking on a notification, often without even reading the text it contains. So, what was our IT engineer told when they asked? ‘They clicked on accept without looking or thinking.’
It is far too easy to blame the student for acting this way. Yet, the briefest look at the psychology of habit explains why this automatic action happens to us much more often than we care to admit. What are habits? ‘Dispositions to produce a certain well-practiced behaviour in the presence of familiar cues associated with that behaviour’ (Wood & Rünger 2016). Wendy Chun suggests that the use of technology matters most to our wellbeing when it has ‘moved from “new” to habitual’. Smart phones, for example, no longer command conscious attention as we chat with a friend at the library but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives as we interact with the machine out of habit. It is through habit that technology has become embedded in our lives, we might say that we have become our machines (Chun, 2016).
This is why digital fluency is about much more than key strokes and menus. We are enmeshed in our devices and habit is a powerful way to not have to pay attention and yet get things done; like clicking on the ‘accept’ icon for the offensive image ‘without looking or thinking’. Staying safe online is about much more than having a strong password.
So, if someone airdrops you an image can you trace who sent it? The best IT minds at my university put their heads together to answer this very question (we all googled like mad). No, you can’t. You certainly can’t when the receiver has accepted the image without looking or thinking. Moral of the story? Make sure that you attend to your privacy settings when sober and not distractedly chatting with friends. You can then be free to gossip in the library without offensive images popping up on your phone.
Want to know more detail? Here are some links
Apple AirDrop has “significant privacy leak”, say German researchers (source for video)
