> Does NameDrop put my iPhone at risk?
I work in a crowded hospitality environment, could my iPhone’s new NameDrop feature put me at risk? How can I protect it from attack?
NameDrop has been the victim of uninformed and false claims about its vulnerability to abuse. However, if you want to turn it off altogether, you can do so in Settings, in General > AirDrop. Turning off Bringing Devices Together, or selecting Receiving Off at the top, will prevent others from being able to abuse it.
You shouldn’t need to do that, though. For NameDrop to work, you have to unlock your iPhone and bring the top edge of both phones to within a few centimetres for about five seconds, and you must deliberately tap Share when prompted to receive contact information from the other phone. This isn’t something that can happen by accident, or outside your control, and if your phone were ever to prompt you to NameDrop when you didn’t intend to, then you can easily block it by locking your phone or simply moving it away from the other device.
If you’re concerned about your iPhone’s security when in crowds of strangers, then you should consider instead whether you should put it into Lockdown Mode, which you can access in Settings, in Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode. That changes the behavior of your iPhone to protect it even from sophisticated attacks, by limiting many incoming services and connections, while still allowing normal use of phone calls and plain text messages. Apple explains Lockdown Mode in detail at https://apple.co/3w6Gz13.