| I think the article comes off to many here as anti-technology because it doesn't continue past the thesis: Apple's vast amount of unilateral control over devices and software gives it the ability to surveil the population in ways that were not possible before. It then goes on to suggest a very consumer-centric way of addressing this, through a special iPhone that's more privacy-centric. This ignores two big things we have to address when thinking about mass data collection. 1. The ability to collect data at scale unlocks capabilities that simply weren't possible before. There are lots of positive outcomes that can come out of this. Focusing on only the negative can lead one to a sort of primitivist mindset, and it convinces no one who feels the positive effects of it. 2. Apple could very well offer a phone with no facial recognition, rock solid encryption, an easily coverable camera, and it would affect close to nothing. The entire point of mass data collection is the "mass" part of it, and as long as people observe the benefits of being tracked (i.e. using maps, social media, finding their lost things, getting notified when their heart rate is up, counting their steps, tracking their sleep, getting notifications, seamlessly backing up their contacts and photos, dictating messages, etc.) then they will continue to be able to collect mass amounts of information regardless if some individuals choose to abdicate completely. Other people are pointing these things out in the comments because it's the natural antithesis to what the article offers. Salome Viljoen[0] talks about this thesis/antithesis in her research on data privacy and ways to treat data from a legal perspective. She explores an alternative to the "I'll just take my data elsewhere" and "I'll just not let my data be collected at all" approaches: democratic data governance[1]. > One path forward reconceives data about people as a democratic resource. Such proposals view data not as an expression of an inner self subject to private ordering and the individual will, but as a collective resource subject to democratic ordering. Democratic data governance schemes consider the relational nature of data: information about one individual is useful (or harmful) precisely because it can be used to infer features about—and thus make decisions affecting—others. The problem is not necessarily that Apple (or Google, or anyone else) is collecting data. The problem is that we have very little say in what data they collect, or what they do with it afterwards, because the data is captured by corporations that act as data fiefdoms without any sort of democratic control. Unfortunately, the massive valuations of these companies are essentially based on the amount of control they have over the data they collected, because it gives them incredible abilities to extract more value out of it. Any loss of unilateral control would be seen as a threat to the value of the companies, which in America makes it very politically distasteful right now. Perhaps that can change. 0: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rH63p3sAAAAJ&hl=en
1: https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/data-as-property |