Wednesday, April 20, 2011

JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID: Doesn't mean Steve Jobs doesn't know where you've been every minute of every day for the last nine months.

Why is this okay? More importantly, why isn't someone specifically marketing devices to me with an explicit promise not to log my whereabouts block by block, second by second, for no disclosed purpose, whether I like it or not. Go far enough to reassure me I'm in control of my information and I'll pay a premium -- even if the phone doesn't make pancakes for me. Am I a demographic of one?

5 comments:

  1. Based on what I've seen, it's tracking where you are (as any cell/GPS enabled device is) and keeping that record within the phone, but there's no evidence that this data is being transmitted outside of the phone or used/sold for advertising purposes.  I do agree that there should be the ability to delete/turn off, but the mere existence of the feature doesn't drive me insane.

    And is there an app that enables my iPhone to make pancakes for me?  Because I'd pay a good $2.99 for that one.

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  2. Squid3:35 PM

    More importantly, why isn't someone specifically marketing devices to me with an explicit promise not to log my whereabouts?

    "Our cottage cheese contains no arsenic or formaldehyde.  Does the other guy's?  We don't know, but if they don't, why don't they say so?"

    I can only imagine the conference call that's going on right now.  If only there were an app that would let me tap into that call...

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  3. isaac_spaceman3:46 PM

    One of the immutable laws of the Internet is that "if it can be provided to somebody for commercial use, it will be provided to somebody for commercial use, irrespective of legality."  Years from now, we will look back on the period of time when we allowed countless incremental invasions of our privacy -- letting Facebook search our emails, letting Apple track our location, letting our browsers track and analyze our purchasing and reading habits, letting anybody and everybody read our tweets and status updates -- and wonder what we were thinking.  I hope that we will wonder in the "gosh, I can't imagine that we allowed that to happen" kind of way, but it's just as likely that we'll wonder in the "why didn't we stop this before it just became a routine fact of life and impossible to stop now" kind of way. 

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  4. I know that my phone (any phone) knows where I am, and that my phone company can be required to provide that enformation to law enforcement.  That's just the level of creepy we all live with these days.  Archiving that information for months at a time in absence of any request, however, is intensely creepy, extra-special creepy, and the mere existence of the "feature" suggests that someone, somewhere, intends to do something with all the data.  Since it was hidden from users and cannot be disabled, there is no question of having consented to the data collection.  Having had the data archived without my consent, I feel like I'm entitled to know the who, what, and why behind it. 

    George Carlin is the source of the crack about cell phones making pancakes.  The original rant went something like "...and nobody has any privacy anymore, but they don't care because they have cell phones that will make pancakes and rub their balls for them."

    I tend to assume my cottage cheese doesn't have arsenic in it.  My cell phone gets no similar benefit of the doubt.  Nonetheless, it's alarming to discover specific details to justify my general cynicism.

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  5. Andrew4:49 PM

    On the one hand, this is creepy. 
    On the other hand, it does produce some cool maps and it's actually neat to have access to this information on yourself. Of course, that means you might also be able to look at the information on your spouse or SO who shares a computer. 
    And on another limb, doesn't the phone company already track this and release the information to law enforcement already?

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