How often do you get a calendar invite from a person who you never interacted through email before and don't have in contacts vs the opposite, and actually take the meeting?
I, in UK, book things on Eventbrite, they email you with a calendar invite. Same with other booking systems for events IIRC. You can probably add people to an invitation? Maybe if you can exploit such a system then people would have them in their whitelist in any case?
A little adjacent to your question but relevant enough I think.
If the recruiter doesn't ask me first (or I don't agree to a meeting), this is called "spam", and I would be happy for the system to just not allow it.
I have never encountered a situation where recruiter starts immediately with an invite without prior conversation (such invite also blocks the time slot of the sender - it would be stupidly ineffective to do that). It is hypothetical and improbable scenario that is not even worth mentioning here.
It just doesn’t make sense to do it ahead of time in such situations. Email client could simply ask if I trust the email before processing the attachment (and some clients do that). Automated pre-processing of attachments is a general risk that doesn’t apply only to calendar.
I've received Apple Calendar invites containing Chinese characters from individuals I've never heard of. I deleted them, but just receiving them was a bit alarming.
Not unrealistic as a consultant. My boss sells me to a project. Then clients might be asked to send me the meeting invite to kick things of. I might not have directly communicated with client at any point at this time.
I recently booked a haircut that sent me a calendar invite via email after booking it. I had never interacted with that email before, but I accepted the invite.
Pretty often at work. I'm often interacting with client/vendor teams or even new people at the company I work for. Probably a few times a week I'll get an invite from someone I have never exchanged an actual email with. Maybe Teams/other chat messages, maybe exchanged information with one of their colleagues, or talked over the phone.
HR / Recruiter setting up interviews? The person doing the inviting might be different from previous calls/emails.
Customer meetings I get invited to often come from someone I’ve never dealt with before, but include others who I work with who were responsible for bringing me into it.
I think there's a pretty big gap between "people at my company are allowed to add things to my calendar" and "random stranger anywhere in the world can add things to my calendar".
"others who I work with who were responsible for bringing me into it" sounded to me like people at your company, who I assumed would be able to add you to the meetings. I guess I might have been mistaken
Depends on who is running the meeting. If the customer is hosting, the others I work with will provide my email to the customer so they can add me to the invite.
There are possible safeguards -- only allowing invites if you are on each other's contact lists, for example, or the same domain, or something else. Apple had a big problem with Calendar spam that they have not really fixed.
I'd want to whitelist specific people before they could send me a calendar invite. Every other invite request should never reach my device. If I don't even know you, why would I want your invites anyway?
The way I understand it now, they attach an invite to an email that you don't even read, but it shows up on your calendar. Is it too much effort to open the attachment yourself? Normally you think twice about opening an attachment from someone you don't know.
Idk, other members of the third party company get pulled in all the time and might schedule something. I can't imagine using a calendar whitelist or why you'd even want to.
Well, to eliminate a source of spam, reduce exposure to phishing, and prevent vulnerabilities like the one talked about in the article by reducing attack surface.
If someone is going to make some demand for my time, the very least they can do is give me notice outside of my icloud calendar. An email, an IM, a phone call, etc are all very easy and they allow me to make sure it's real before it has any chance to interfere with my schedule. "Hey Boss, this guy says he's our new IT guy and he wants to talk about my network settings" or "Hey $vendor, I just got a call from $rando saying he's our new contact, can you verify that for me before I tell him everything I know about your propriety applications?"
It helps that I like to keep my work devices and my personal devices entirely separate. If someone in the office wants to pull me into a work meeting through outlook, they'll already have to have an account set up on the company's exchange server. Anyone outside of the company I should already have a relationship with or at least a heads up.