From East to West, scary attitudes to personal data
My youngest daughter started high school this week. While the first week is always challenging I couldn’t help but be impressed by the school’s process, from po¯ whiri to orientation through to support people.
It’s far cry from my recollections of my first week at the boys’ high school I attended down south, where it was very much sink or swim. The first couple of weeks as a ‘‘turd’’ former were spent avoiding the gangs of organised bullies.
The tradition saw older boys forcing newbies into the toilets to be ‘‘ducked’’, having your head shoved down the sink or worse. You were also expected to recite the unofficial school rules including ‘‘no snitching’’ and ‘‘what happens on tour, stays on tour’’.
Apple head honcho Tim Cook borrowed the wording if not the context of the latter, for the Consumer Technology Association’s massive trade show in Las Vegas last month. Apple covered the entire side of the Marriot Hotel with the legend: ‘‘What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.’’
The takeout here – as articulated in the company’s privacy policy – is that Apple is committed to protecting the privacy of its customers. Good news for the estimated 1.2 million iPhone users here in Aotearoa.
It’s a message Apple has been saying for some time now, including famously to the FBI in 2016 when it refused to unlock an iPhone used in the San Bernadino terrorist attack.
Less than three weeks after the Marriot stunt, it’s a message that’s in tatters following the discovery that the iPhone’s Group FaceTime tool has a bug that lets you eavesdrop on other people. Simply put, if you called a person on Group FaceTime and they didn’t pick up, you could still listen in on their conversation.
The bug effectively turned your phone into a remote-control listening device. Not flash.
Apple scrambled to issue a fix and delivered apologies up the wazoo, but not before it had to beg forgiveness when delivering its fourth-quarter earnings report.
But Apple’s transgression, which we can probably accept was an honest if unfortunate mistake, was just a polluted drop in the data ocean compared with the Facebook revelations last week.
It turns out that Facebook has been paying people, teenagers specifically, for access to their private data for the last three years. Users have been paid up to US$20 (NZ$30) a month to sell their private data by installing an iOS or Android ‘‘Facebook Research’’ app.
While it’s bad enough the app collected the phone owners’ information, it also collected the information of the people they came in contact with including metadata, message content, images, videos and user details.
Upon finding this out Apple immediately closed down the iOS app by withdrawing its enterprise certification.
Apple had previously given Facebook access to its Enterprise Developer Programme, which gave it wide-ranging access across the iOS operating system.
This was intended only for internal use by engineers and testers at Facebook, popping the hood on the software and giving them close to open access.
However, what Facebook appears to have done is harness that open access to build a datasucking app, in direct violation of the enterprise agreement.
Remarkably, Facebook has not closed down the Android version of the spying app. In fact, it has defended it. In a statement, Facebook notes that ‘‘it wasn’t spying as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate’’.
Likewise, chief operating officer Sherryl Sandberg came out fighting on television, but when pushed on the app did admit ‘‘we still have some work to do’’.
It will be interesting to see how the European Parliament responds. To my way of thinking, while a person may contract to sell their private information to Facebook via an app, they can’t sell the data of the people they are interacting with on that app.
I’m sure the western Europeans will be refining their opinion as I write.
Meanwhile, if you thought that was concerning enough, it’s worth looking East.
The Chinese government is in the middle of building a massive ranking system based on social media and civic behaviour that will monitor China’s 1.3 billion people and give each person a ranking based on their social credit.
First flagged four years ago, the social credit system embodies the idea ‘‘keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful’’.
A couple of million people are piloting the programme, which will become mandatory for all citizens by 2020. People with low social credit scores can be punished by the likes of having their internet throttled, having their kids kicked out of school and getting banned from flying.
So in China, rather than ‘‘what happens on tour, stays on tour’’ it’s a matter of ‘‘what happens on tour, stays on file’’.
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director and adviser. His Twitter handles is @modsta and sometimes he still feels like he’s at school.