Month: April 2011

Here’s hopefully my quick response to the latest privacy concerns surrounding the iPhone’s Location Service
I’ve picked out a blog post by Oliver Haslam from Remond Pie entitled Your iPhone Knows More About You Than You Think It Does. But Does It Really Matter?. I know of Oliver indirectly through the Sheffield Twitter scene so hopefully he doesn’t take this too personally. But Oliver’s opinion on this matter reflects what quite a few people are thinking of the whole situation, and I hope to outline why they are ‘wrong’.

First off I’m going to presume you already know about the iPhone Tracking scandal, if not you can read about it here.

Innocent
If it was the Windows Phone or Android platform logging all of your location requests rather than the iOS would it be more of an issue. I think so, too many consumers see Apple as the good guys and automatically presume that this is an honest mistake. Where as with the other two, you cant help but think its malicious. I do believe this ‘feature’ was never intended to be exposed in such a way (explain more soon). But the fact that it has existed for a few years now in one way or another shows that Apple are aware of what it does.

So what?
This is the exact response that you get when you bring up this tracking issue, and for the most part I agree. I don’t particularly care that my location is being stored, and most likely never even open by anyone other than the device itself for its intended purpose. But for me that’s not the issue.

Data Oliver points out how your Call details and SMS messages are stored on your phone, well, you already know that information is store, and you know if you wish to get rid of a message or call history you can go straight in and remove them. Not with location, nobody knew that their location is being stored in PLAIN TEXT on their handset constantly, not only was it a couple of recent locations you may have been to but your WHOLE history. (Limited to mostly cell towers and only when location services is on). Which brings me onto the privacy issue.

Privacy
Everyone is entitled to privacy and in my eyes this breaches it. Oliver points out that services like Foursquare and latitude. They both take your location and store it to provide you a service. The difference here though is they are 100% opt in, to the point where you chose which exact location spots it stores (You can even remove them online). If you use these apps you know for the most part what’s going on with your data and you know that you are handing out the data.

Oliver also points out Facebook and Twitter as an argument that privacy no longer applies, while I also agree overall. Facebook and Twitter are still both 100% opt-in services. You decide what personal information you add to these sites (Name, Address, Phone Numbers, etc etc.) and yes, by using these services you cant assume that it will stay 100% private. For me though, I don’t expect my phone to be logging all of my movement without me knowing, storing in plain text, and if I backup my phone to my computer (can’t really avoid it) its also stored there.

Just because you don’t have anything to hide, don’t presume that everyone else wants to live in public too.

During my morning read of the internets I came across a quite interesting and thought provoking article from Louis Gray, entitled: Physical Media Has To Go. I’m Digital Only From Here.

Quick summary for those who don’t want to read the whole blog posts I’m responding to.
Louis points out that how in reality we use very little of our huge physical media collections that we used to own. He also points out how services such as Netflix and Spotify have changed how we consume content, arguably leading to an all digital society.

So I want to respond to this post and argue that while all digital is great for convenience and for most people it may be more than suitable. We as a society are really not really for dumping all those CDs and DVDs for subscription streaming.

Most of what I will write is more related to movies and TV shows as music has pretty much been solved over the past few years. (Increase in bandwidth and competition)

Subscription vs Purchasing
On the very basic level, Subscription is essentially paying a monthly fee in exchange for ‘unlimited’ (as in selection and access rather than length of time) access for that month, usual at a low cost.
Where as purchasing is you exchange a fee for the product that you then ‘own’ (EULAs may disagree but I’ve yet to see any proof that they will hold up legaly).

Internet
The internet is not ready for everyone to start streaming all of their content. Simple. Not only is dial-up usage still horrifically high (not so much the richest countries, but emerging economy’s will struggle). Where there is ‘high speed’ internet access (of atleast 2mb) there’s not enough bandwidth to stream realtime (see issues with storing for the other side).

Quality
Quality is a huge factor and selling point for physical media second to the actual ownership of the product (resell & lend to a friend just two of the selling points)

A DVD at retail is around 8gb of data with around 3 hours of content not only would you need around a 8MB internet connection, you might need to watch out for caps, throttling and all the other nasty things ISPs do to oversell their services.

So at this point you may be wondering about compression and such. Well if streaming services are going to replace physical media they need to have at-least the same quality if not better otherwise the whole idea will just not work. Imagine going back from enjoying full CD quality of Vinyl to 192kbps steaming (as audiophiles weep).

Storing
So if streaming high quality (read DVD – 2000s) is tough for most consumers; how about storing? Aside from the potential legal and inevitable DRM annoyances that will need to be implemented (to a point where you may never get to play your media in the same way you could with a disc). The consumer would need a safe way to store this media. TVs cant really do this at this stage. Computers could no problem, but its hard to get that content then onto the TV (Home DLNA doesn’t really cut it ‘yet’). DVR is the perfect device for this, providing there is enough space on that for all the films you wish to download. What about backing up if re-downloads are not allowed? (eg. iTunes).

As it stands dropping all physical media does not work. Sure if you just want to watch a film or listen to some music whilst you work. But you are seriously compromising on quality – what the producers of this entertainment work towards.

We are already stepping towards an all streaming society and in the long run I can see all media being available online in high quality with a touch of a button. With physical sales being sold though specialist stores (LPs now). Just not yet.

Quality is how the industry (Music, Film and TV) differentiate themselves from the pirates. Removing the selling points just make pirates look even more tempting.