Apple’s AirDrop can be an incredibly useful utility, but it is possible that you could be sending more than you bargained for, as researchers have found that an attacker could glean the phone number and email of AirDrop users.
the researchers reported this privacy issue in 2019, but a reported 1.5 billion users are still vulnerable as Apple has seemingly done nothing. Earlier this week, researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt published a blog outlining their findings about AirDrop. To preface, AirDrop allows users to share files with address book contacts. To verify that someone is in an address book, AirDrop uses a “mutual authentication mechanism” to compare a user’s phone number and email with entries in the other user’s address book.