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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."
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!"
Yea, no wonder iPhones seem to be multiplying like jack rabbits.
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.
Dammit! ... They are using the Chewbacca defense!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Yes it does.
The Corps slid into our fiduciary trust and smoothly moved money in and out of our bank accounts, and becoming quite excited in the process. Then they embraced us and extended us more products. They nearly extinguished the economy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Apple PR failed to remove a lot of the misconceptions about the little location file on the device, so let me take a crack. 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, some of which could be up to 100 miles away. As a result, the phone is not storing your location, but instead just downloading a bit of cache data so it can look up your location faster when you want it to. That responds to the 'storing' part of your post. With respect to tracking, if you know a way for a navigation app to give you directions and locate you, but not track you, I'd like to hear it. In the meantime, if you would like the phone to NOT know where you are, period, just switch off 'location services', which, as of 4.2.3, also deletes the local cache database.
Meanwhile, all sorts of information about your location is leaked by all the devices you use. One trivial example is your IP address, which, while not a precise locator, gives the other end some idea about where you are (assuming no proxies, etc etc)
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
The only way you have been track an iPhone is if the device is configured to use MS Exchange or MobileMe.
The Device records location data (not your precise location), and uploads location data (without any unique identifiers), but doesn't track your location (unless you tell it too with Apps like Gowalla and Google Latitude).
If Law Enforcement went to Apple and said "I want to know UncleTogie's movements for the last week", and you don't have MobileMe, Apple would have nothing to give them.
They may however use Google Latitude, Gowalla, Foursquare to track you with Public information you posted on purpose, or use Cree.py to track you by Twitter or Flickr pictures. They could also contact your phone company and triangulate you via Cell Towers, as they did to Mitnick in 1995.
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.
English Translation: It stores your location, just not very accurately.
Mistranslation. It stores several locations all around the point where the phone was. Now if we ignore the fact that nobody can lay their hands on this data without stealing my phone or computer, in which case (1) my phone or computer is gone, and (2) there are things like email, address book, browser cache that I worry about a lot lot more, and if we ignore the fact that there is very little someone could do with _exact_ information where I have been, information that shows my location within half a mile is completely useless to anyone.
You know that firefox keeps copies of web sites you visit on your computer. They say its just so that they can load pages faster, but I know that all of that data is being secretly sent to the firefox cabal who are secretly selling that information to the highest bidder. I know because I read about it all on slashdot.
Caches like this are common and for good reason. Sure, it would be better if the file was always encrypted and it would be better if it was trimmed down to only a couple of days worth of data, but all that takes developer time and since this file isn't accessible on phones that have not had their warranty voided I'm sure the developer in question didn't even consider this a problem.
But sure, its much more fun to imagine that there is some kind of grand conspiracy at apple that goes beyond selling a bunch of fucking iPhones and making boat loads of money doing it.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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?
Apple sent a VP of software tech and Google sent a lobbyist. If I'm going to listen to a lobbyist, they better be paying me money.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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?