- The White House has blamed an iPhone feature for Signalgate -Fiasko
- This saw a journalist mistakenly added to a military planning group chat
- The “Contact Suggestions to the Suggestion” can be disabled
At present, you have probably heard of ‘Signalate’, in which President Trump’s national security adviser accidentally included a journalist in a confidential wartime planning chat on the Signal Messaging app. Well, now it seems that a key iPhone feature may have found out the whole mess at least at least in the White House.
According to The Guardian, the White House now says iPhone’s “Contact Proposal Update” feature contributed to the wrong number (Atlantic journalist) added to an existing contact card for another person (Trump spokesman Brian Hughes).
To explain how this happened, we have to go into the weeds of their correspondence. It started when the journalist in question – Jeffrey Goldberg from the Atlantic – emailed the Trump campaign at the end of 2024 to get his answer to a story the sales were to run. Goldberg’s e-mail was forwarded to the then Trump spokesman Brian Hughes, who copied and inmate the message-Inclusive its signature, containing Goldberg’s phone number and emailed it to Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz.
At one point after this, Waltz’s iPhone automatically found the phone number in Hughes E email to Waltz and suggested it as a new number for Hughes – not for Goldberg, the person actually associated with. This happened presumably because the number was included in an E email from Hughes, which the iPhone took to mean the number belonged to him.
When the military planning group was created in the Signal app, Waltz intended to invite Hughes, but accidentally invited Goldberg instead, whose number was now stored under Hughe’s name in Waltz’s iPhone. And thus, the Trump campaign managed to inform a press member of very confidential military operations before they had even begun.
How to even avoid this error
The iPhone feature can be useful. For example, if a friend gets a new number and includes this in an E email they send to you, your iPhone may suggest the new number for you without you needing to look for it in the first place. It can help keep your contacts Book up to date.
But obviously the feature can sometimes get things wrong. If you want to disable it, open the Settings app on your iPhone and go to Apps> Contacts> Apple Intelligence & Siri.
From here you need to disable the shift next to Show contact suggestions. This prevents your iPhone from automatically suggesting new phone numbers, E emails and addresses to your contacts.
For particularly sensitive contacts (eg as people you want to add to a secret military planning group), you need to manually check that their details are correct and up to date because technology that we have seen can sometimes get it wrong.
