Apple was mistakenly capturing iPhone and iPad owners' voice recordings without consent for months, according to a statement to ZDNet. The only reason we know about this is because the game was given out in a recent iOS 15.4 beta version.
ZDNet has provided an update to its original story on February 12th. "An earlier version of this report said that the flaw was resolved in iOS 15.4, however it was actually corrected in iOS 15.2," the site notes. This is a significant clarification that, while partially positive, casts Apple's activities in a more favorable light.
While the corporation deserves credit for moving faster than expected (two months rather than five months after user audio was improperly shared with Apple), this does not excuse the company's lack of transparency in this matter.
When Apple discovered that user audio was being collected without authorization and stored on Apple servers, the only reasonable course of action was for the company to be upfront and inform customers of the situation. Bug or not, the error represented a clear breath of user privacy.
As it stands, on multiple occasions Apple has now had access to audio records of its users without their permission (details below) and every time Apple had to be caught out before admitting what had happened.