Apple vice president Guy Tribble and Google’s Alan Davidson spent the day in front of the U.S. Senate explaining mobile privacy, particularly as it relates to location tracking. This is why these hearings are being held:
Senator Al Franken, who chaired the hearing, said: ‘People have the right to know who is getting their information and how information is shared and used.
‘I still have serious doubts those rights are being respected in law or in practice. This is an urgent issue.’
Apple and Google, to nobody’s surprise have a different view:
Guy L. Tribble, Apple’s vice president of software technology, said its devices only gather and store location information about nearby cell towers and wi-fi hot spots.
The company, he said, ‘does not share personally identifiable information with third parties for their marketing purposes without our customers’ explicit consent … and Apple does not track users’ locations. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.’
Mr Tribble added that an upcoming software upgrade will encrypt location data on devices, Tribble said.
Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy for the Americas, said Google asks Android device owners whether they want to turn on location services.
‘If they opt in, all data is anonymized,’ he said.
The fact that they’re even in front of the Senate shows just how distrustful the public is of Apple and Google. Even though you should have no expectation of privacy in this day and age, here’s why you might want to care about this. For example, if a battered woman’s psycho ex-husband was able to find everywhere she’s visited in the last year by stealing her iPhone, that’s a problem.How about a simpler example. You have an Android phone given to you by your current employer and you take it with you to a job interview. Nothing wrong with that. But your employer if they were so inclined could figure out where you’ve been if they had an app for that.
Are these extreme examples? Perhaps, but I used to think that you could do anything with impunity on the Internet. Clearly that isn’t the case. One wonders how long before examples like the ones above play out in real life.
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This entry was posted on May 10, 2011 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Apple And Google Testify In Front Of The U.S. Senate
Apple vice president Guy Tribble and Google’s Alan Davidson spent the day in front of the U.S. Senate explaining mobile privacy, particularly as it relates to location tracking. This is why these hearings are being held:
Senator Al Franken, who chaired the hearing, said: ‘People have the right to know who is getting their information and how information is shared and used.
‘I still have serious doubts those rights are being respected in law or in practice. This is an urgent issue.’
Apple and Google, to nobody’s surprise have a different view:
Guy L. Tribble, Apple’s vice president of software technology, said its devices only gather and store location information about nearby cell towers and wi-fi hot spots.
The company, he said, ‘does not share personally identifiable information with third parties for their marketing purposes without our customers’ explicit consent … and Apple does not track users’ locations. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.’
Mr Tribble added that an upcoming software upgrade will encrypt location data on devices, Tribble said.
Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy for the Americas, said Google asks Android device owners whether they want to turn on location services.
‘If they opt in, all data is anonymized,’ he said.
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This entry was posted on May 10, 2011 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.