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Privacy Wars

April 23rd, 2011 | by | apple, rants, security

Apr
23

A recently article from the guardian shows that your iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go. Many of your know that I’m an iPhone user and supporter as I have a often neglected iPhone App site.

You’re probably thinking to yourself right now, great, another fanboy coming to Apple’s rescue.

WRONG!

What the fuck Apple? Seriously, what the fuck? Is there a good reason for keeping track of this data? I mean seriously, what are you doing with it?

Actually, there is a good reason for it and its all about advertising. The guys at work have heard this on multiple occasions that the iPod, iPhone, iTouch, iPad are all marketing devices. Mainly for selling anything and everything from iTunes but with iAd, they can now sell you anything. It turns out with a little googling you can find that the Terms and Conditions changed with iOS 4 and there was a feature explained that Apple can track you to provide more relevant ads to your phone. And to also provide features such as Find My iPhone.

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.

Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

So does this make it right? No, I don’t think so. I think this sort of tracking is very very wrong. If you want to put up a service like this, it should be in the app to disclose my location. If I’m a developer, I have to allow for this pop up to appear. But apparently apple and their iAds do not. That is where we have an issue. The end user is used to the pop up appearing and only then does their location information get used. However, Apple apparently bypasses this for their iAd service which is not honoring the end user wishes in all cases.

So what can you do?

I know I only have myself to blame for this one as I should have read the terms and conditions more closely. But there is a way out of it. Just as you read above, simply go to http://oo.apple.com/ on your iOS device and you can opt out of the tracking. (Credit Geeky-Gadgets.com for this post.

What about Google

Don’t worry Android fans, you’re not left out in the cold either. Turns out the Wall Street Journal has discovered that Google is also transmitting data from the Android.

And don’t forget about the google street cars and their tomfoolery.

There is a site out there that can map the location of your wireless router via the Google Android’s Wardriving Database. I put in the mac address of my wireless router and was not surprised to find it in there with a GPS coordinate of my street. Awesome!

So now what?

Like many people out there, I was pretty pissed at Apple and Google to begin with. But at the same time, its my own damn fault, I didn’t read the Terms and Conditions like I should.

We live in a society of ever increasing intrusions into our private lives. These intrusions must be fought off in order to keep our private lives private. So my friends, opt out whenever you can and stay vigilant of new “features” that are released. Your privacy is only good if you fight to protect it.

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Bing!

January 8th, 2010 | by | in the news, micro$oft

Jan
08

Recently we had a pretty funny conversation with our Microsoft premier support tech. It was clear that a memo had gone out from up above and he was doing his part to push bing out to everyone that he could. Unfortunately, he forgot he was talking to engineers. We’re smart ass bastards and he should know better.

The conversation went something like this.

Tech: Have you guys tried Bing yet?

Us: Yeah, but I don’t see us switching anytime soon. Google is still the better search engine.

Tech: Really guys? I haven’t found that to be the case. Bing has been really great!

Us: Ok, let’s do an experiment shall we, Go to bing and search for “Exchange 2007 SP2 rollup 1 download”. You’ll find a bunch of blogs talking about the download, but not the actual download page itself. Now go to google, type in the same thing and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

At the time of this conversation, the “I’m feeling lucky” link took you straight to the download page, the bing results did NOT have the download page listed on their first page of results.

Tech: Oh, yeah…I guess we have some things to work out.

Us: We’ll try again once Microsoft figures out how to index their own site.

Unfortunately, that conversation happened a couple of months ago. The results are getting a little bitter for bing, but google is still the king of search.

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Google Apps Sync

June 14th, 2009 | by | in the news, micro$oft

Jun
14

I’m not sure how many people have picked up on an announcement that Google made last week, but it definitely caught the attention of my dev team. (For those that may be new to this blog, I work for a company that offers Hosted Exchange and Hosted OCS services.)

Here’s the announcement.

Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.

Microsoft’s Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google’s new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren’t ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google’s version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition–as well as Education Edition customers–will be able to roll out this plug-in across their networks and allow Outlook messages, contacts, and calendar appointments to sync with Google Apps.

Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world’s corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies. Quoting data from Forrester, Google’s David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google’s hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.

Demo:

Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there thinking that we’re screwed. And I’m not sure that is completely true yet.

First off, we’re the first hosting provider to tie in hosted OCS with Broadsoft. Not something that everyone has done. But what does that have to do with Exchange? Everything. Its about presence. The killer application for exchange is NOT email, its calendering. OCS + Broadsoft is an extension of that. Having your IM status update because you are on a call is pretty cool and not something that a hosted service can typically offer.

Second, is Google ready for the Enterprise? Is the Enterprise ready for Google? There is still the perception that Google is beta (more below). Exchange can safely say that they are a carrier grade solution. They have done some heavy lifting for enterprises for many years and enterprises are well entrenched in their Exchange systems. Having an outlook plug-in may break that for some of the smaller guys. But I highly doubt that they will be converting the big boys with the 20,000-30,000 users.

Now, how well does this play in the SMB space? These would be the 5-50 email account systems. Well, I think it will play fairly well for those that want to shell out the cash for the premier version which will be required for the outlook plug-in. But for most, even when the costs are cheaper, there is still a group of admins out there that will not outsource their email to Google. Here’s an example:

Recently, one of my former co-workers a few jobs back was talking about putting up a new email system. They were working away from having it dog food off their hosted service. This way in case there was a catastrophic issue with the system, they could still get support email. The system has been around for many many years and new development isn’t part of the daily routine anymore so moving it out makes logical sense.

Now, he mentioned how he was putting together this box that would allow IMAP, POP, incoming and outgoing mail and webmail access. I had to ask him why? Why not just setup Google apps for domains? You could be up and running with all those services in under an hour and with the number of employees there, it would cost him nothing which was an important selling point. Because believe me, I’d love to sell him my service but the budget just isn’t there. His response to me was two fold. First, he doesn’t want to use a beta product. I don’t think that the email is beta anymore but even if it is, I’ve never had an issue. Second, he doesn’t trust Google. Now that one I’m not sure any convincing on my part would be able to overcome. But this isn’t the first time that I have heard it. There are some people that are drinking the Kool-Aid and think that Google can do no wrong. There are others that sense something is not right under the hood there. I personally don’t have major issues with them. I think that they collect a lot of data which makes them a bit dangerous, but so far, they haven’t done anything to jeopardize my trust with them.

So where does that leave us? I’m not 100% sure. I’m not sure having the plug-in will suddenly make people look around and go, “Holy crap, I could move all my email to Google and still use outlook, freaking awesome! ” The area that I think it will play pretty well is the smaller customers that really need the calendaring and are big time outlook users. They might start struggling for a bit of money and maybe they decide to take the leap to Google away from their hosted Exchange service to save a few bucks. But I’m pretty sure that this won’t suddenly convert a huge group of the IMAP / POP crowd as they have always had the calendaring issues and use an array of clients. So they’re not 100% sold on the outlook side of things.

Time will tell I guess.

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