by Angela Guess
A new article discusses the recent surge in privacy concerns following public realization regarding the iPhone location trail: “If privacy is dead (as a number of technology executives in whose interest it is for us not to care about privacy have opined), there wouldn’t have been much fuss over the most recent time researchers discovered that iPhones – like pretty much every other phones in the world – track your location and use it to build up maps and traffic information. Often that’s where those handy green and red traffic lines on the maps come from; detecting how fast how many people are driving (because digging up the roads to put sensors in is really expensive, compared to scrubbing off the identity from the incoming flood of location data from phones)… Better information faster; that’s what we all want, so what’s the problem?”
The article continues, “In the case of the iPhone location trail, the problem is one, that the average user didn’t dig through umpteen pages of the ITunes EULA to see that Apple was asking for this information… and two, that leaving the location traces on the phone in a poorly protected file seems like an invitation to snoopers (legal and illegal) to grab information directly from the phone. That’s less data mining and more data strip mining… The news that Android and Windows Phone also collect and anonymise location information isn’t a surprise (and Microsoft yet again surprises critics by turning out to have the strongest privacy policy – and it hardly matters whether it’s poacher turned gamekeeper syndrome or an honest belief that privacy matters or a cynical belief that privacy matters and is a good way to compete). But while location gets a lot of attention because it’s such a personal, private thing, there are a lot more sets of data out there that the industry needs to be having a conversation about.”
It goes on, “One of them is going on in the US Supreme Court right now in a case about whether data mining companies can sell (anonymised) information they’ve gathered about the prescription of brand name drugs (instead of cheaper generics) back to the pharmaceutical companies. The Supreme Court is looking at how the case affects commercial free speech and whether the State of Vermont is just trying to stop drug marketing, but the decision could set a precedent for wider issues about turning masses of data into useful information.”
