Privacy—Apple and the Rest
by Miki SaxonLast week in The Hypocrites of Tech we found that while companies’ push tech for your kids, e.g., Apple iPads, the CEOs, e.g., Steve Jobs, seriously limit their kids’ use of tech.
Tech is making deep inroads to every part of our educational system, but there’s nothing altruistic about it.
They do it to reap the reward of the tsunami of personally identifiable information they get on your kids, with nary a restriction in place—although that’s changing.
Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used.
Legislators in the state [California] passed a law last month prohibiting educational sites, apps and cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students from kindergarten through high school; from using the children’s data to market to them; and from compiling dossiers on them.
I use DuckDuckGo for search, because I don’t believe that it’s any of Google’s business where I go on the Net—but Google doesn’t approve.
Fortunately for Google tracking, slicing and dicing their customers/users isn’t bad; that’s because evil, as in the motto “Don’t be evil,” is a fluid term, while Facebook is famous for doing first and apologizing later.
Then there is Apple.
If I ever break down and get a cell phone it will be an iPhone, but not because of the bells, whistles and apps.
It will be because of the privacy statement made by Tim Cook.
Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.
One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.
I understand that there are people who don’t care about being tracked or seeing ads based on what’s in their email.
But the more people are subject to stalking by marketers, the more they learn about how their data is used and the more they see how the EU reigns in the same companies the more they are demanding similar safeguards.
For now, it’s wise to remember the old saying, “If it seems too good to be true it probably is.”
The bottom line is simple; when it comes to most of the free goods and services, especially those involving social media, caveat emptor.
Image credit: MAPping Company Success
