The illusion of privacy…

What if a company restricts the user’s ability to control and own their devices? If they can Implement scanning of pictures to look for child pornography, collects more data from phone users than even from Google-based Android phones. How can they still claim they care about *your* Privacy?? Who’s privacy do they care about, if all your data is accessible by them at will at a push of a button?

Apple’s Illusion of Privacy Is Getting Harder to Sell these days.

The iPhone is a gluttonous collector of user information. The devices beam location data as well as information about Wi-Fi usage and internet usage to Apple’s servers, even when we think the devices are slumbering. That type of data opens up iPhone owners to alarmingly accurate tracking by third parties, including their whereabouts, political leanings, job and family status, ethnicity, and net worth.

Through a third party, Apple has made Chinese users’ data accessible to the Chinese government, as The Times reported, a sleight of hand that allows the company to say it doesn’t directly turn the information over. That makes it hard to believe that Apple might not act similarly where its business interests demand it — even at home in the United States, Apple fulfills secret personal data requests daily.

“The do-not-track option didn’t really solve privacy,” said Patrick Jackson, the chief technology officer of the privacy firm Disconnect. “It was designed to make users feel like they could press a button and fix it.”

If Apple believes that tracking is anathema to privacy, why not disable the identifier itself or disable tracking as a default?

Apple is also building out its own online advertising business, portions of which a French privacy watchdog said may run afoul of European laws. The agency said that Apple doesn’t appear to require users’ consent for tracking, as it now does from other app makers, meaning it could benefit from the targeted advertising that its do-not-track feature is meant to hinder.

Google’s Android mobile software also has a voracious appetite for data but may be less vulnerable than the iPhone to broad attacks, such as the recently uncovered one affecting tens of thousands of phones reportedly targeted by NSO Group’s Pegasus software. That’s because Android runs on many different phone types, each with slightly different versions of the software, said Zuk Avraham, the C.E.O. of the cybersecurity firm ZecOps. Pegasus software reportedly collected all manner of personal information, such as emails, voice mail messages, passwords, contacts, call logs, social media posts, web browsing history, and photos, and it can remotely activate a user’s phone camera and microphone, according to The Washington Post.

Apple also has access to text messages, a workaround that’s apparently necessary to aid law enforcement. But for most consumers, it’s a distinction without a difference; photos and text messages are primarily created and accessible on the phones that Apple tells us are “private”.

Tech companies would like users to believe that they hold the keys to their own privacy. But, locked into Apple’s or Google’s ecosystems, our data is as secure as their policies. I’d like to trust that the biggest technology companies have the best intentions, but when they have to say out loud that our privacy is paramount, it sure is difficult.