facetime - security question

paul112

My children have an ipad with facetime on. In the last couple of days it has rang and a middle aged man has been on screen. My children have shown me immediately and I have declined the call.

I realise it could be nothing more than a genuine mistake but, can I set facetime up in the same way that skype is ie, in that they can only receive video calls from people who they have "accepted".

I have now turned off facetime and told them only to switch it on when they want to use it. Obviously the problem with this is that their friends now need to find a way to let them know they need to switch on their facetime when they want to contact them.

Lifeforms

I dont think there's a specific setting for that, but check out this thread, and follow through to the thread linked inside it by lllaass, as it says doing it that way stops both imessage and facetime
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3448477?tstart=30
(apple threads, so safe to read)

Fergie76

Can you not accept the call, covering your camera or switch to the back one and point it a blank wall or something and see if it is something sinister or just a genuine mistake?

Mr_Toad

I use Facetime on my Mac to talk to a couple of friends and I've had several random calls from complete strangers. For the most part as soon as they realise I'm not the right person they shut down without speaking but occasionally they want to know who I am and why I'm using <insert name here>'s iPad.

The last one was a whole family, husband, wife and little girl sat on a sofa who were obviously expecting to speak to a relative. They were as confused as I was, the person they were calling didn't even have a similar name.

It was almost like dialing a wrong number but according to them they'd called the right person and got me.

fiendishlyclever

You can change the email addresses at which calls are accepted,which means a new address (but could just be used for this purpose and could be quite hard to guess)