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Apple Discusses iOS Privacy Issues Before Congress
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier today, Apple's VP of software technology, Guy L. 'Bud' Tribble appeared before a congressional hearing on mobile privacy to address concerns that were first brought to the forefront following the 'location tracking' controversy that emerged a few weeks ago."
Stick it to the man, man !!
Remember Guy, the fifth amendment is your friend.
Business: "Blah balh balh baahh ab;lhnz'l;kcj[a'j hatever ..."
Congress: " Well balhh abllhaofha;fh;adh;afh"
business: No sir because: "alfja;dfhadf;af;a"
Congress: "You're right. here's some laws that benefit you!"
End of story.
I think Facebook and Google need to be drug out before these commissions as well.
We need serious laws with serious teeth on privacy in every space - home internet, mobile data, and everywhere else. CLEAR opt ins and opt outs, not garbage buried in a TOS document no one reads.
The BIGGEST problem is that most people and corporations think it's OK to collect personal information and location data as long as "this can't be tied back to an individual person". That is NOT OK.
Considering that the hearings about the economic collapse didn't result in any jail time or even any fines for the perpetrators, Tribble should just show up in flip-flops and a t-shirt while drunk and say "What's up, sluts? I hope this isn't going to take very long....yea, we violate privacy but considering you didn't do anything about Wall Street execs that literally raped this country out of trillions of dollars I'm sure as shit you are going to get off your fat asses for some lousy cellphone privacy issues! Peace out, bitches, catch you on the flippity flop!"
While Apple certainly deserves a lot of blame, so do all the people who purchased their products. It has been clear for ages that their model is one of lockdown and control. If you support that kind of thing financially, you bear some of the responsibility for the direction that our society seems to be going: erosion of personal ownership and transfer of control to multinational corporations.
Your actions should reflect how you want the world to be. If you act opposite of that, in the end, you will get exactly what you deserve to get. Buy a machine that treats you as an enemy, and don't act surprised at the results.
This goes for all kinds of things. We now have more and more single player games that require a network connection for permission to play **because people keep buying them**. As long as the next shiny-shiny is more important than how far you have to bend over, we will get what we deserve to get. No laws can ever change this, because laws are a trailing fix; they can't prevent the next form of abuse.
... is tell congress that they're baking features into the OS for what the DHS will want from them ...
. The location information on the iPhone is not YOUR location, but rather a collection of location data points that includes the cell towers in the local vicinity,
English Translation: It stores your location, just not very accurately.
Is there any chance at all that Slashdot might make a tiny amount of effort to report about Apple and Google in the same tone when they are sitting side by side talking about essentially the exact same stuff?
When you present a story like this in such an slanted way, it begins to reek of the technics used by right-wing radio hosts about stuff they consider liberal. There are plenty of legitimate things to criticize Apple for, that you don't have to reconstruct reality to create new ones.
If you had read the article, you would know that the info Apple stores relates to cell tower locations, and wifi hotspots. No identifying information is sent to Apple at all, and they would have no way of identifying you even if approached by the FBI. They would have to get their hands on your phone, which within a few days, already had a fix to remove the cache after a few days, and you can permanently delete it just by turning off the location services.
If it got to the point where warrants were issued, they could easily collect device specific info from the Cell providers. Apple's data didn't even have device specific identifiers.
Google on the other hand started talking about 'Openess' and finding 'balance', when their response was anything but. They basically stated that they weren't responsible for how the app's handled location data and that it was up to the app developers to be responsible. Of the two, I think Apples response was appropriate, both in patching the bug in the OS, and in anonymizing the data they do collect to begin with.
From TFA:
This kind of response from Microsoft or Apple would never be tolerated on slashdot. This thread just seems to be glossing over Google's response. The proper response from both companies is to work to provide better protections. Apple has already taken those steps within a few days of the bug being reported. Google just sidestepped the question with no commitment to finding a better approach.
Disappointing.
You know what, the hard disk in this PC I'm using records *every piece* of personal data that I produce on it, documents, spreadsheets - the lot. It even records some passwords. That's bad right? As far as I know, the data isn't being sent to HP, but do you think I should format the drive every day?