- Apr 9, 2013
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Now goodness knows that there are rabid Macoyltes as well as raging Android'ites and both will speak with all the passion their preferred OSs demand. Me? I'm ambixtrous, using an iPhone 4 and a Nexus 7 tablet and see operational value of both - but I gotta say, Cook's recently reported speech (see, for example, SiliconBeat – Quoted: Tim Cook talks privacy, takes aim at Google) on privacy brings up some salient points.
For all the hand-wringing we do and moaning about privacy and not letting 3rd Party companies or governments have access to our personal information as a matter of course (and as highlighted in the whole Snowden affair), we seem perfectly fine with letting companies like Google and Facebook - whose whole raison d'etre is to take each time we turn on our OS, each keystroke we make, every site we visit, every post we make, every search we do, every call we make, every photo we create, every contact we have and every calendar date we create and to take all that and sell that information to the highest bidder. Google, Facebook, et al might insist that its all about metadata and, individually, we count for nothing, but I'd believe that if then targeted ads didn't make their way back to my devices. Metadata, my a**.
Then there's the whole 'Cloud' thing - where we forgo all pretense to privacy by uploading our lives to companies for 'backup'. Gone is even the basic security (and the point of 'personal computers') of having stand-alone, local devices, software and storage.
Big Brother isn't (just) the government, it's every company with whom these companies have a contract. And while Apple is hardly in the clear, its not their purpose to be a vast user aggregator for others. We really should be brighter than this. Are we really okay with this?
For all the hand-wringing we do and moaning about privacy and not letting 3rd Party companies or governments have access to our personal information as a matter of course (and as highlighted in the whole Snowden affair), we seem perfectly fine with letting companies like Google and Facebook - whose whole raison d'etre is to take each time we turn on our OS, each keystroke we make, every site we visit, every post we make, every search we do, every call we make, every photo we create, every contact we have and every calendar date we create and to take all that and sell that information to the highest bidder. Google, Facebook, et al might insist that its all about metadata and, individually, we count for nothing, but I'd believe that if then targeted ads didn't make their way back to my devices. Metadata, my a**.
Then there's the whole 'Cloud' thing - where we forgo all pretense to privacy by uploading our lives to companies for 'backup'. Gone is even the basic security (and the point of 'personal computers') of having stand-alone, local devices, software and storage.
Big Brother isn't (just) the government, it's every company with whom these companies have a contract. And while Apple is hardly in the clear, its not their purpose to be a vast user aggregator for others. We really should be brighter than this. Are we really okay with this?
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