Slashdot Mirror
New iOS 11 Settings Will Stop Apps From Tracking Your Location (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Verge:
Apple is giving users the option to enable much stricter location rules with iOS 11, according to MacRumors. The company began this effort last year by adding a new option to iOS 10 that grants apps access to your location only while they're actively being used. But this "while in use" setting is up to developers to actually enable. The vast majority of popular apps did integrate that new feature. Others, however -- Uber chief among them -- still force iPhone users to choose between always or never providing location data. The latter choice breaks the functionality of an app like Uber, leaving customers with really only one option. Apple seems poised to eliminate this false choice in iOS 11 by making the "while in use" restriction available for every app.
This is excellent news because it restricts one avenue in which apps can violate user privacy. However, because Slashdot users generally hate Apple, there will be a knee-jerk reaction to spin this into some way to criticize Apple. It is fascinating to watch the delusional hate of Apple, even when they do something good like improving user privacy. This is a good thing for privacy, and if anyone but Apple did this, Slashdot readers would applaud them. However, because this is Slashdot and the story is about Apple, prepare for delusional hatred of Apple.
WebOS may have been ahead of its time, but Palm was massively behind the curve in getting it out into the market. If they had launched it two years earlier around the same time as the original iPhone I think they'd still be around. By the time they came out it was too late as iOS and Android were already fairly entrenched and the two biggest carriers in the U.S. were locked into their camps and strategies and had little need for the Pre and it wasn't so much better than anything else to cause people to abandon their carriers for Sprint.
HP was also a bad buyer for the company. They had no real strategic vision at the time or ability to make the product a success. As funny as it sounds, I think Microsoft would have been a better buyer and could have built on top of the established OS and market share instead of putting effort into their own mobile OS that they trotted out just to see it go through the same set of problems as WebOS due to Apple and Google having such a lead by that point that only a huge mistake on their parts could cause them to fail.