Woman left paranoid as FaceTime gives warning after flashing partner
FaceTime is useful for helping you stay connected with friends, family, and loved ones who might be thousands of miles away, but for some, they’re using it for more NSFW reasons. One Australian woman has now flagged an incident where Apple supposedly issued a warning after she flashed her significant other.
While we know that Apple has a family-friendly image to uphold, we're also sure it knows that not everyone uses FaceTime to chat with their grandma.
As reported by news.com.au, 25-year-old 'Frankie' decided to spice up a lunchtime FaceTime call with her partner and exposed her breasts.
Why did Apple flag NSFW FaceTime call?
Frankie's call apparently ground to a halt, with her partner given an Apple pop-up that read: "Are you sure you want to stay on this call?”
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Saying that the call paused while she was exposing herself, Frankie explained: "I couldn’t speak to him, and he couldn’t speak to me.
“It just looked like he had paused on my end — like he’d turned his camera off, but there was no sound or anything. It was as if I got put on hold."
We can understand why Apple might have a feature like this to avoid those many awkward horror stories, as we've heard about people accidentally going to the toilet in front of their colleagues on Zoom, but some are concerned by the implication that Apple is watching.
As for Frankie, she says her husband unpaused the call and then told her what happened. Reportedly also offering help, Apple's message read: "How do you feel? You don’t have to stay on this call if you don’t want to."
There were also options to end the call with "Not Now" or override the pause by pressing "Yes, Continue".
Saying that she felt like she'd been caught off guard, Frankie admitted: "You don’t even know what Apple have, what they don’t, or what they see."
More than this, the whole experience made her question what she was doing in general. Opening up about how she felt in the aftermath, Frankie said: "What if you’re away and having phone sex or something? I went down a whole spiral thinking, what if it doesn’t recognise your body because of what their algorithm thinks nudity ‘should’ look like? What is their standard of what it’s supposed to look like?"
How does Apple's Sensitive Content Warning work?
Conducting a search online to see if others had faced the same problem, Frankie realized she'd likely triggered Apple's Sensitive Content Warning feature.
Apple directed news.com.au to its Support Page that reiterates how its safety system will detect and blur photos or videos that contain nudity, gore, and violence. It works a little differently on FaceTime, with tech pausing a stream when it suspects a breach.
Managed through Screen Time's Communication Safety feature, parents can keep their children safe by permanently enabling it on accounts for younger users. Adults can toggle it off by heading to Privacy & Security and selecting Sensitive Content Warning.
Despite complaints that this is 'invasive', Apple maintains that systems are strictly private.
FaceTime's Sensitive Content Warning is supposedly handled by "on-device machine learning" rather than actual human eyes, and as materials are analysed on your device, Apple isn't directly notified of what's been flagged, and no visual data is sent back to the tech giant's servers.
Apple users complain about FaceTime scrutiny
This wasn't good enough for Frankie, who dug deeper on Reddit to find a thread where others shared similar experiences. One post included a woman who'd recently turned 18 and apparently had her FaceTime flagged when she tried to show her boyfriend her new bikini ahead of a cruise.
Replying to that thread, one person added: "Privacy is a myth. Now you know.'
Another said: "The only infuriating thing is the fact that they apparently were forced to implement such a feature. Too much creeps out there."
Not everyone was against the Sensitive Content Warning feature, with others calling it a 'blessing in disguise'.
Supporting Apple's work from the sidelines, someone else concluded: "This is what you call a great safety feature. One-touch option to proceed anyway if you really want to show whatever you’re showing, but an opportunity to save lives for those too dumb or naive to realise the dangers of sexting. Mildly infuriating? More like a mild blessing."
As for Frankie, she says her red-faced run-in with FaceTime won't stop her risqué chats: "Yeah, I’ll still do it! But I told him to turn the setting off on his phone, obviously."