Time has come to have a right to remain private. My quest in 2019 is not only to focus more but also to fight for privacy and ownership of my data. This fight is being fought by carefully selecting which service I choose to use or not use.
David Bowie, the Internet, in 1999.
Who cares about privacy and user data ? Not ATT, T-Mobile or Sprint obviously. John Gruber reacted to this. Who cares ? Well, it seems Tim Cook does. Full text of Tim Cook in the Time Magazine. Thank you for this. A thread on Twitter on this follows.
Four basic principals proposed by Tim Cook:
First, the right to have personal data minimized. Companies should challenge themselves to strip identifying information from customer data or avoid collecting it in the first place. Second, the right to knowledge—to know what data is being collected and why. Third, the right to access. Companies should make it easy for you to access, correct and delete your personal data. And fourth, the right to data security, without which trust is impossible.
Finally a simple conclusion by Tim Cook:
Technology has the potential to keep changing the world for the better, but it will never achieve that potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it.
What Steve Jobs said again on privacy ? Here.
No, you won’t see two pictures of me ten years apart. No, but think about it. Suddenly, within a few days, or even hours, people started to share those pictures of them taken in 2009 and now. For no apparent reasons. On Twitter. On Facebook. This is what I thought. The, I read this Wired article: FACEBOOK’S ’10 YEAR CHALLENGE’ IS JUST A HARMLESS MEME—RIGHT?
What if the only purpose of this “game” was to train new machine learning algorithms at Facebook so they can refine their data with carefully selected pictures by people? I don’t know. Facebook denied they were behind this. Nonetheless, here is something to think about:
Regardless of the origin or intent behind this meme, we must all become savvier about the data we create and share, the access we grant to it, and the implications for its use.
A big statement by former Apple’s CEO John Sculley: “We’re going to see something similar in health” while comparing to the iPhone impact on the world. Even from the outside, It seems to me that Apple found their way with wearables. The Apple Watch 4 is a prime example of this. And the AirPods could too play a bigger role in the future. I can see other devices too that we wear on other parts of our body that transmit their sensor data to the iPhone then into Apple’s Health database.
Can’t wait.
[Update: 2019-01-16]: They are really serious about health judging by this rumored initiative from Apple: Apple in talks to put Apple Watch into the hands of Medicare users.
Following my reading of Wired article “WHY SHOULD ANYONE BELIEVE FACEBOOK ANYMORE?” I had even more reasons to quit Facebook. In a word, the motivation of Facebook is not what they said or what they say. They lied.
That is no surprise but Facebook collect a lot of data. Want to know what exactly? Have a look at this article. I like the last paragraph:
The bottom line: Facebook’s privacy policies reinforce the message that “you have control over who sees what you share on Facebook.” But if you use Facebook at all, you don’t have much control over what Facebook itself sees about you.
