And just when I was riding that Genius high. Can you see me? I'm taking a deep breath and rolling my eyes furiously. I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but to see these privacy/ security violations makes me insane, I just have to write about them. I'll post some lolcats or something later to atone.
Just had a gander at this Wired article, but I'll basically sum it up below:
The iPhone (and by association I assume the iPod Touch) take screenshots of everything you do, then stores them. When you think of how the minimize function works, it's actually not particularly surprising or alarming. What IS both surprising and alarming is the fact that these screen captures are not immediately deleted by the device when the minimized window is closed, but rather saved.
According to the article this glitch(??) has been so well documented that it has been used to apprehend "criminals who have been accused of rape, murder or drug deals."
The icing on the cake?
"There's no way to prevent it," Zdziarski [hacker] said during the webcast. "I'm kind of divided on it. I hope Apple fixes it because it's a significant privacy leak, but at the same time it's been useful for investigating criminals."
THAT^. THAT right there is what frightens me about this article. It's one thing to know these problems exist, it's one thing to discover these flaws and point the angry finger but the minute we start balancing the importance of our personal privacy against the useful investigative nature of these glitches for apprehending "criminals" is when we close our eyes and let our civil liberties melt away. Because one day in the not so distant future you could be one of those "criminals." Just remember that for a moment.
It makes my blood boil.
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4 comments:
Yes, it's bad that this data can be misused in unintended ways. But to call Apple "evil" for implementing things this way (the article you linked to notes that there are perfectly good reasons for the data to be cached) implies a whole lot of sinister intentions that aren't reasonable to assume. So yes, let's hope this is fixed, and in the meantime let's be less accusatory.
Hey, I like Apple. I own an Apple computer and an iPod- I vote Apple over PC any day. But I think they have next to NO respect for user privacy.
But there is absolutely no evidence that this feature is about privacy at all. The screenshots aren't transmitted to Apple, they're not analyzed to determine usage habits... yes, it's too bad they can be misused, and the issue should be fixed. But if you're going to harp on privacy issues you should actually choose an instance of willful invasion of privacy.
That's all I'm saying, I think it should be FIXED. My largest issue was with the way the guy I quoted cavalierly dismissed privacy issues because it catches some "criminals." I think that is LUDICROUS and frightening. That sort of attitude is insanity and is going to make these issues more and more common place.
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