Not to steal any thunder from my colleague Joe Tomasone, who wrote a wonderfully astute piece regarding this whole “LocationGate” debacle, but I have my own two cents I want to throw in.
This whole media flurry comes on the heels of a discovery that Apple stores location data on the iPhone. Later, it was reviled that this data is not used to track anyone, but rather to cache cellular towers, and wi-fi hotspots so as to better locate the device, via GPS, when it’s called for by the user. But to me, part of this boils down to privacy* vs. convenience. Much the same as security vs. freedom is argued in government.
For all intents and purposes, Apple is doing this for a convenience sake for the end-user. If they didn’t, every time you fired up your iPhone for GPS purposes, it would take several minutes to find GPS satellites flying overhead. Apple has also promised to fix the bugs that store this data indefinitely and to drop it from iPhone backups, and encrypt the data, and unicorns.
What I suppose I’m trying to get at here, is that Apple isn’t harvesting data for malevolent purposes. Apple is a company, who does things for money. What would they do with this (extremely vague) information? Sell it? Use it to spy on you and make sure you are using Apple branded headphones with the device? What? Apple is not in the information business.
Now, not to start a fight, nor am I saying this because they are a competitor, but a company like Google, doing something like this, could scare me (but it doesn’t). Google makes it’s money from information. That’s all they do is track information. That’s not to say they would store your location (or personal) information to show you ads, but they would most certainly be the most likely contender.
That brings me to the overall privacy vs. convenience debate. Perhaps Apple should have ran this feature by the public first, or even ask the user when they’re setting up their device if it is ok to gather this information. But we as a culture, living in the information age, are going to have to decide if we want privacy or convenience more. Just as we’ve always had to decide in our elections if we wanted security of freedom more.
It’s admittedly a strange problem to have, but I think it’s one that we’ll have to figure out as a society. As Joe pointed out in his piece, if Apple hadn’t made GPS location fast, they would have caught hell for it. So, what do we want? Quick and easy, or our what we perceive as our privacy?
* In this case, I say it’s what we perceive as our privacy. Our privacy was never genuinely at stake in this case.
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