Privacy Change: Apple Knows Where Your Phone Is And Is Telling People

[drummer]

Apple updated its privacy policy today, with an important, and dare we say creepy new paragraph about location information. If you agree to the changes, (which you must do in order to download anything via the iTunes store) you agree to let Apple collect store and share "precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device."

Apple says that the data is "collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you," but for some reason we don't find this very comforting at all. There appears to be no way to opt-out of this data collection without giving up the ability to download apps.

Here's the full text:

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.

Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.

http://consumerist.com/2010/06/privacy-c...eople.html

[prisma]

Always thought it was kind of obvious apple tried to get you hooked on their products for some other purpose than just to make money off you. Im guessing they have a partnership with the federal goverment and are supplying them with surveilance data. Like google, motorola and cisco are rumored to do to.

[zabestof]

If we are to think that they won't use the data in other ways than marketing purposes we should not worry about it but, and there is a big BUT, what if they are about to share it with the gov? Then, we're so fucked up.

[SiLVa]

A friend of mine just updated his iphone the other day. Found out that any pictures that he took with the phone, before and after the update, were stamped with a location. He was a little worried because he was recently at a friends house that had some beautiful "trees" that he took some pics of. Needless to say, he deleted them right away, but this is not surprising.

[Easy Skanking]

Quote:ALL YOUR DATA ARE BELONG TO APPLE

You know, I miss the time where my data for my phone was on a little memory card, or that maybe it would just simply act like a USB Drive when plugged into a computer. No drivers, no bloated ass management studio. Just a simple file system.

Good old "Drag & Drop". Let me manage my content in folders. I can organize everything with clever little names like "Pictures" and like "Music" and like not have to deal with some database that thinks it owns all my content.

Not to long ago I bought into the Mac thing. "Wow, this new Mac is so simple to use! Everything just works! I love mac. Its soooooo cooooool looking!! XXX!!! OOO!!!" and for a while it was. Life seemed simple again, my phone had a little sync app, I could easily download movies, and music, and TV shows! Everything seemed so easy!

Its like the story of Hansel & Gretel. You find this nice house, and its made of candy. So your like, "Wow, this is really great, cause I love candy!". So long as you're there, everything seems great! You eat and eat, gain a bunch of weight, until the witch rares her ugly head having fed you all this digital content and wants to throw you in a damn oven and eat you with a nice chianti. Ppffffftfftft.

At some point, my love affair with the neat Mac'isms started to fade. What seemed so fresh and new and hot, started becoming annoying and pretentious. Everything had to be in mac format, it damn near updated every day, images were no longer image files, they were hold up in some database, and all my music and movie files now no longer worked with the outer world or my XBox. I started missing the simplicity of CTRL+C and CTRL+V just working like it's supposed to. Instead the mac would beep/cackle at me, and remind me that "Oh yea, mac is Option+C, sigh, Option+V".

I wanted change, I wanted my PC back, I wanted my file system back. I wanted simple.

So I got a laptop, installed Windows 7, and everything was in its right place. I lost a lot of data that is tethered to the mac world, but it was like getting back together with the old girlfriend. Comfortable. Familiar.

Which brings me to today. Still have this damned iPhone, with about 8 gigs of music, pictures, movies, pod-casts, applications. You know, everything. So I thought, screw it, I'll go ahead and get that new 3.1.2 update, it adds MMS messaging right. Cool. Should be simple.

Downloaded iTunes, plugged in my phone, everything is great. Downloaded the update, backed up my phone, my settings, my music, pictures, applications, and movies. Restarted and everything is gone. No music, no pictures, no applications, ALL GONE.

No warning, no "If you upgrade or sync on this PC, since you threw away your mac, we are going to remove all the stuff you put on your phone. Its ours and all your data belongs to us." No sir.. Just GONE. BLANK. Full reset. When did we stop owning things we paid money for?

So take your databases and take your media control Apple; and I'll take my file system and my "Drag & Drop".

You know what...

Fuck you Apple, I'm a PC.

http://canthavenothin.com/2009/11/03/all...-to-apple/

[yeti]

If you've collected a fair amount of nerd points over the years, you can jailbreak your iPhone and install linux on it - not recommended for n00bs, however...