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Why Are Apple's Competitors Staying Silent On the iPhone Unlocking Fight?
erier2003 writes: A court order forcing Apple to help the FBI access a terrorism suspect's iPhone has drawn responses from leading tech companies, newspaper editorial boards, and security experts. But one major faction is staying largely silent: the computer and smartphone manufacturers who compete with Apple for business and could be subject to similar orders in the future if the company loses its high-profile case. Silicon Valley software firms have universally backed Apple in its fight against the Justice Department, which won a ruling Tuesday from a California magistrate judge compelling Apple to design custom software to bypass security features on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. But Apple's hardware competitors are staying on the sidelines.
What good would it do them? Since Google has taken point on designing, evangelizing, and (recently) mandating strong, backdoor-less crypto -- actions they, along with most of the technologentsia, are firmly in favor of -- they can ride the wave of inevitability, rather than stick their neck out with broad anti-government pronouncements. Sometimes the best PR is no PR.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Google may make the core OS for Android devices but I can assure you that Samsung and HTC and LG and the other OEMs releasing Android devices do a lot of software work themselves. More to the point, it would be HTC or LG or Samsung or whoever that would need to produce a customized software stack with a backdoor in it if the FBI needed it, not Google (especially if the device the FBI wanted cracked would only run signed firmware)
If Apple wins, everyone of them win. If Apple loses, and they could, they lose alone.
Listen to the proffered positions of the pretenders to the Presidential nomination. To many non-tech people, Apple's stance is bordering on treason.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
One of the big reasons to spend $600 on an iphone instead of $100 on an Android is privacy and security. I need a smartphone about $100 worth, but I was just about to bite the bullet and get an iphone because of the phone's built-in encryption and Apple's pro-privacy policy. Now I'm going to wait and see. A backdoor into iphone makes me less likely to fork over the extra money, to the good of Apple's competitors.
Let's look at a few good reasons to stay silent if you're an Apple competitor.
1. Apple's competitors are based in South Korea and China. They're going to have a much harder time arguing privacy with the US government.
2. Apple has lots of money and excellent legal counsel. They'll put up a better fight than their competitors possibly could.
3. Staying silent won't piss off any American lobby groups, and it probably won't piss off the American general public.
4. This could be a PR nightmare if someone mis-words something. You don't want to accidentally paint yourself as pro-terrorist.
5. There's no obvious win here. If the corporations win and privacy remains paramount, eventually someone is going to do something awful that involves encrypted communication. At that point, the corporations look bad. If the government wins, things could devolve into 1984 if the wrong people ascend to power.