This petition is complaining about the neighbor on your left letting his dog crap in your yard, when the neighbor on the right is running a meth lab. We are carrying around phones filled with spyware to track what we listen to, watch and read an where we do it.
How hard is it to discern even our sleep habits? We put them on the charger beside the bed at night and tune in to Pandora. If our phones can't tell if we're sleeping around or alcoholics already, it won't be long until they can.
Like most petitions this one is a distraction. It keeps our energy focused on the wrong part of a larger issue and one where any leverage we have cannot create fundamental change.
And what do you propose Microsoft or Apple would do with the knowledge that I'm an alcoholic who is cheating on my wife? Why would they care? They're in business to make money, and there's not much money in extortion, not for long. If my phone called my wife automatically to tell her where I was and what I was doing, it wouldn't be long before no one bought that phone and Apple went out of business from the privacy lawsuits.
Yeah, we carry devices that are spying on us. Why do they spy? To sell us more stuff. They don't try to hide that fact. Your fearmongering is off topic here, and fairly irrelevant elsewhere too.
They spy because they can. They spy because the companies involved believe that the data they collect has value. They spy because the companies involved believe that the data they collect might have even more value in the future.
The companies involved aren't in the business of selling you stuff. They sell data about you to others. Sure that might be a retailer of Hello Kitty backpacks with scenes of unicorns shitting rainbows. It might be a presidential campaign. It might be a government - and in that case, the value exchanged might be trade privileges rather than cash.
Large commercial ventures willing to harm many people for the sake of profit are not unknown to history e.g. the East India Company and International Association of the Congo. Likewise, industries adopting standard practices which do so - e.g. tetra-ethyl lead.
I may be wrong. But I don't think that just because I live in the US corporations have any more respect for my human dignity than they do for the citizens of Honduras or Pakistan or Albania.
Not wrong at all, understated if anything. The Harvard Business Review highlighted Big Data a few issues ago, and public interest groups like EPIC and the EFF are on this full time. It doesn't take much reading from those sources or the many others to see how valuable big data i.e., spying, can be. Just follow the money.
They will make money from your data regardless of whether it "outs" you to your wife or not. They have no respect for your privacy which means they will sell out some of their userbase (or other people they happen to have data on) if it will make them money.
Secret formulas deciding our credit limits and insurance premiums because spying gives them information is the problem. Not the information that we might pay more for a hotel room.
One big reason they spy because there are a lot of webdevs who either have no idea or do not care about PII. Why would someone put a link on their website, to Facebook or Twitter for example, basically giving them all of their extremely valuable web logs for free? These companies make big bucks from those unnecessary "live links" and go to great lengths to avoid questions about why they "need" to be live (and they don't).
In a world in which computers chips are ubiquitous and connected it is almost impossible to avoid this kind of risk. We implicitly trust numerous companies who could have left back doors in a system. I trust Android more than the random ASIC in my phone or the proprietary software in my router.
I am typing this on my smartphone. Obviously I accept some risk as well. I suspect we would agree that our acceptance doesn't make it less of a risk. I don't think that my acceptance such risks makes the petition any less of a trivial distraction from the broader and more serious issue.
Are you seriously believing nobody (be it a random app or your phone seller) has ever tracked your GPS history, looked at your media player library (which includes play counts), looked at who you have in your addressbook, etc ? Yet there are (or were) APIs to do all these..
You can care about it or not, but saying it's false is kinda bold.
I didn't say it was false, I said it was FUD. FUD isn't necessarily untrue, merely overblown and overhyped.
I'm certain that the apps that have "tracked my GPS history" have done so with my consent and knowledge.
I use Google Play for my music, so there's no doubt that my playlist and playcounts are on someone else's server somewhere. I also know that at least one Google engineer has seen my playlists because I had to ask for help with an issue with the service before surrounding tag edits.
"Looked at who I have in my address book" - sure. I use an Android device so all of my contacts are backed up on a Google server. I somehow doubt that anybody is rifling through that information.
My response to all of the above is "So what"?
There are APIs to pull that information, but they require my consent to do so (the permissions before apps are downloaded, and those can be restricted anyways with the aid of something like LBE Privacy Guard).
Malware and apps that surreptitiously access this data are rare.
How hard is it to discern even our sleep habits? We put them on the charger beside the bed at night and tune in to Pandora. If our phones can't tell if we're sleeping around or alcoholics already, it won't be long until they can.
Like most petitions this one is a distraction. It keeps our energy focused on the wrong part of a larger issue and one where any leverage we have cannot create fundamental change.