Q A creep on my flight kept trying to AirDrop photos of his anatomy to my laptop. Was there any way to identify the sender remotely?
A: No. The Apple wireless feature that lets you share photos, videos and other files with iOS or Mac users is built for a trusted environment. And while it comes set to accept incoming files only from people in your contacts list, it doesn’t provide tools to deal with abuse if you change that setting.
In this case, a friend had reset AirDrop from “Contacts Only” to “Everyone” to ease sending files to and from co-workers.
She enlisted flight attendants to find the offending person, but they had no luck. Unfortunately, she does have company. People have been attempting “cyber flashing ” for years, exploiting the automatic preview AirDrop provides of an image sent from an unknown sender.
And since AirDrop works from as far away as 30 feet between Apple devices with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless active — they don’t need to be on the same wireless network — it can be easy for an abusive AirDropper to escape attention on a crowded subway car or airplane cabin.
A recipient of this kind of garbage can’t block the sender or look up any details about the person beyond the sender’s username.
To see if you’ve set AirDrop to accept files from anybody or just your contacts, ignore the Settings app that controls most system-wide features.
Instead, in iOS, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up the Control Center, then tap its AirDrop tile to set it to “Contacts Only,” or, if you don’t trust all your contacts, “Receiving Off.”
On a Mac, switch to the Finder and select “AirDrop” from its Go menu. At the bottom of the AirDrop window, click the blue “Allow me to be discovered by” heading and select “Contacts Only” or “Receiving Off.”
If you do need to send or receive a file with a colleague, a fellow event attendee or somebody else you haven’t added to your contacts, remember to reset AirDrop to its default afterward. And if that file transfer would take place from one Mac to another, remember you can also use Bluetooth file transfer.
That older option is not as quick or as seamless, but it’s less open to abuse — the receiving device has to accept the sender’s “pairing ” request before the file goes anywhere. And unlike AirDrop, Bluetooth has the added advantage of working with Android and Windows devices.
On an iPhone or iPad, however, Bluetooth doesn’t support file transfer, so it’s AirDrop or nothing. Apple didn’t answer questions about possible changes to AirDrop, but I will endorse one proposal security expert Ken Munro made to the BBC two years ago: After you switch AirDrop to “Everyone,” have it switch back to the default, “Contacts Only” setting once you haven’t used it for 10 minutes or so.