Apple's FaceTime: the teenager who received a reward for discovering a bug that allowed people to spy on the call service

An American teenager who discovered a security flaw in Apple's FaceTime video call system received a reward for giving the company information.

Apple has not disclosed the exact amount it gave Grant Thompson, 14, but it is believed to include money to finance his education.

In January, the child found an error that allowed them to listen briefly, in secret, to the recipients of a FaceTime group call, even though they did not answer.

The teenager discovered the problem when he used FaceTime to talk about strategies for playing Fortnite with friends.

Grant and his mother warned Apple about it.

The company considered the error so serious that it deactivated the group function of FaceTime while investigating and looking for a solution.

Before the young man, a security researcher had refused to give details of the error to Apple because they did not offer him a reward.

The news about the reward for Grant came to light on Thursday, when Apple released a software update that fixed the error.

Rewards policy
Currently, the famous apple company only rewards for errors found in the iOS operating system for phones.

However, security experts should be invited to participate in a program that pays up to $ 200,000 for the most serious errors to receive rewards.

This Apple policy is not well received by all the experts in the sector.

This is the case of Linus Henze, a researcher specializing in security, who has saved details about certain vulnerabilities in the MacOS operating system for password theft.

Henze says he will not reveal the details of the problem to Apple until the company does not include MacOS in its rewards program.

"My motivation is to get Apple to create a rewards program for mistakes, I think this is the best thing for both Apple and the researchers," he told the technology news page The Register on Thursday.