I was fortunate enough to receive a few CDs to feed to the iPod, which I haven't updated in a few months. Which served as a reminder that iTunes counts how many times a track's been played. Because you know as well as I do that if that information's not being shipped back to the Mother Ship in Cupertino now, it will be. Although, upon further review, I've been accused of any number of things, but having any taste or consistency in music has not been one of them. Which means that I'm figuratively weeing in the data pool. Hee.
Certainly, knowing makes me complicit in Apple's eavesdropping--no question. But the idea of smartphone apps monetizing not only what I'm doing but where I'm doing it is orders of magnitude creepier. And more infuriating.
Frankly, this time I'm cheering for the lawyers and tobacco-settlement-scale penalties. Why? Because it's the only recourse in a world where the mobile companies have been given carte blanche by the current FCC, with its successors no more likely to curb abuses. Because, you know, forbidding software makers to pimp their paying customers to advertisers would "hurt competitiveness," "stifle innovation," and "cost jobs." (Because the oligarchs are already doing a bang-up job of that all by themselves, thank you very little.)
The notion that the free market will correct it is laughable. First, the four-way oligopoly in smartphone platforms will eventually be three--probably sooner than we imagine. (My money's on Microsoft dropping out before RIM goes belly-up.) Moreover, how many tens of millions of iPhones have been sold to people who couldn't possibly have missed AT&T's Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern collusion with warrantless surveillance?
Which brings me to my last thought: If the government were collecting that level of detail on peeps, we'd morph into a nation of mobile Luddites. Yet, as we (collectively) should have groked in 2006, that data is only one network connection connection or data dump away from being in the NSA's hands...and being classified as "state secrets." Why on earth would that single degree of separation make a difference in anyone's mind?
Which is why I believe that, even if the plaintiffs came away with a pittance and some of the co-defendents are driven out of business by a heavy-handed damages award, it'll be the best thing to happen to the market. And to set the precedent that privacy is a right, not a privilege that can be rescinded with a vague clause in the clickwrap weasel-ese.
