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U.S. Senator Asks FTC to Investigate Apple and Google Over Photo Uploads to Appmakers [Updated]
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Way to go Schumer. What major battle will you fight next?
I think those people that make leaky underarm deodorant cans need bitch-slapped. Give 'em hell Chuck bay-bee!
I think those people that make leaky underarm deodorant cans need bitch-slapped. Give 'em hell Chuck bay-bee!
I don't know what humanism (belief in human free will over divine intervention) and solidarity (unity) have to do with being left-winged?
But I think you have it backwards about communist indoctrination in the US, the worst part about McCarthyism was that a few actors got black listed by Hollywood studios. This has been hyped into such a big deal that it eclipsed the fact that communism is responsible for the greatest atrocities ever committed by mankind. 2/3 of the world's murders from 1900-1987 were committed by 'communists'. 110,000,000 killed by communists. Battle dead from all wars during this era is only 38,000,000. That means almost all war in the 20th century was trumped by communism by over a factor of 2 to 1. Any indoctrination was probably too mild if anything. I think you should probably read up on the whole topic a little more, and rectify your ideals of humanism and solidarity with actual historical facts. You should also know that actors get blacklisted all the time for all sorts of reasons petty and grand, this will never change. I'm not planning on losing any sleep about Hollywood jobs past, present and future... like ever.
In reality, there's no possible way you (or the government) can possibly account or explain all the reasons why people are unemployed. And since laws are to be applied equally, this is an unsolvable problem for government. There will always be disparity in wealthy, just like there will always be disparity in looks, intelligence and endowments. That's a hard fact of the vast, cold and indifferent cosmos.
If there's a shortage of jobs, then socialistic programs are an even worse economic idea. For starters your market has too many workers for too few jobs, so it becomes a job buyer's market and wages go down all around. So now your idea is to compound the problem by taxing those with jobs to support the surplus unemployed workforce? That's never going to work, and case in point, it isn't working. Worse is that waves and waves of Democrats and Republicans have looted the already insufficient funds for these programs to pay for further bureaucracy and kingdoms for politicians.
So now instead of admitting defeat, those that support this fantasy, want to tax... the rich! Of course, Mr. Peanut and the Monopoly guy are loaded, they can afford to pay for everything! But that is completely unfair and totally discriminatory (ie. treating people differently under the law), and as someone who prides themselves as 'left-wing' it's surprising that you can't see the hypocrisy of this notion. Once you get into the business of discriminating, you lose any credibility to make statements about who is treated fairly or not. You're either for equality or you are not and for tyranny, not matter what kind of fuzzy name you call it... socialism, communism, feudalism, etc.
Anyways, as for Schumer... he's just a political Dvorak, if he latches onto anything about Apple, he knows it will get his name in print. This issue has already been addressed by consumers, whose satisfaction is paramount to Apple's image and bottom line. If his intentions were altruistic, then why the press conference? Why not in a session of Congress? That should tell you all you need to know.
Listen, I'm hardly a Schumer fan, but I feel I must point this out. He was re-elected in 2010. Senators' terms are 6 years, so he is next up for election in 2016.
Senator Schumer, like the rest of Washington, is all for killing off industry in any way they can in the name of protecting us from ourselves. Any company they don't control or have a vested interest in needs to be sued, taxed and regulated to death.
The good news is that everyone's photos are copyrighted upon their creation, you'd have to do something silly like sign a creative commons or other agreement to forfeit your rights to the images. Unless the app in question had something in it's TOS upon launch or with an account registration, where you agreed to an unconditional license for any material uploaded (ie. Facebook).
I think you meant to say that you registered your photos with the Library of Congress which is really just a formal record of the copyrighted works. Kinda like a birth certificate, you're still birthed (as in squirted out of mommy) even if you don't have one on file. Having the registration sure makes things easier down the road though, ditto with copyright registrations.
I'm not surprised to find the amount of reactionary posts in this thread.
It's ironic that people are flipped out because someone is standing up for YOUR right to privacy, whether you think its genuine or not.
Of course there are bigger issues, but that doesn't mean that the smaller issues don't need to be addressed, and thats where I find the negative reactions absurd, and perhaps an indication of mass-social conditioning.
If the government did what Google, Facebook and Apple are doing people would be screaming "Big Brother!", but that's what these corporation are leading up to and people have been marketed into complacency.
I fully expect that my post will receive more dislikes than likes, if any likes at all, such as some other very rational and realistic posts I've seen.
And this thread will devolve further in division rather than unison. If the average person can't decide to work with each other on problem solving, how can anyone be angry that any governing body can't do it also. But it's easier to transfer that self-righteous anger onto someone else. So go ahead and shoot the messenger, and feel justified while doing it.
It's ironic that people are flipped out because someone is standing up for YOUR right to privacy, whether you think its genuine or not.
Of course there are bigger issues, but that doesn't mean that the smaller issues don't need to be addressed, and thats where I find the negative reactions absurd, and perhaps an indication of mass-social conditioning.
If the government did what Google, Facebook and Apple are doing people would be screaming "Big Brother!", but that's what these corporation are leading up to and people have been marketed into complacency.
I fully expect that my post will receive more dislikes than likes, if any likes at all, such as some other very rational and realistic posts I've seen.
And this thread will devolve further in division rather than unison. If the average person can't decide to work with each other on problem solving, how can anyone be angry that any governing body can't do it also. But it's easier to transfer that self-righteous anger onto someone else. So go ahead and shoot the messenger, and feel justified while doing it.
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Schumer is interested in banning or regulating anything he's too stupid to understand. No surprise here.
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No one makes me do business with Google, Facebook or Apple. I do so voluntarily.
I *am* forced to do the government's bidding. They have guns, prisons, etc. to backup their intent.
I see a huge difference.
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No one makes me do business with Google, Facebook or Apple. I do so voluntarily.
I *am* forced to do the government's bidding. They have guns, prisons, etc. to backup their intent.
I see a huge difference.
The Senator AND the folks here complaining about this as a privacy issue seem to completely miss that this is exactly how computers have worked since before there were Macs and PCs. Users run programs which can access their data. That is a necessary element of computing. Suddenly being outraged at an operating system because it doesn't make it impossible to create a malicious program is... outside the reality based paradigm.
Yes there is a difference.
You are interacting with Google whether you think you are or not. It doesn't matter if you are signed in using a Google account, any device used to connect to the internet had a unique ID and that information can and is being collected and mined.
With the amount of money that corporations funnel into the political system, I would be concerned about how that data is used. The corporations directly benefit by controlling the masses, and keeping information off the radar is an effective way to continue to program people into being obedient consumers.
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I just want to state that I appreciate the posts that engage in rational discourse.
The more information WE have and share the greater the potential to solve problems in a constructive manner.
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Welcome to the internet, Sir.
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Sounds like an upstanding human being....
He didn't apologize until he was heavily criticized for the insult... ala Rush Limbaugh
Wow, I'm kind of surprised. I'm sure this guy is doing this to get votes, but I agree with him. I think that private photos should be made private. I dont care why or what this guy's intentions are but I definitely agree with him. Sounds like the apple fix should be relatively simple, although I dont know squat about programming, so I could be wrong. Either way, I think it would be a move in the right direction. I dont know how many times I had to end up not using an app because it wanted my facebook information, spotify being the latest one.
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Yep I agree. Nice to see some people still value their privacy. I thought this was one of the big differences between apple and google.
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Yep I agree. Nice to see some people still value their privacy. I thought this was one of the big differences between apple and google.
The intent has changed. Apple has a framework specifically designed to allow access to your entire photo library. That isn't a bug. The new framework, introduced with iOS 4, is ALAssetsLibrary and Apple even demonstrates it's broad use in a WWDC video.
The bug is the poor popup message that Apple supplies. It should be clearer that it isn't just the location information that is being exposed.
Oh, there is another bug I noticed last week while coding up a new app. In iOS 4.3, the popup doesn't appear but an app still gains access.
I don't know the 'fix' to appease users, but I for one don't want to be bothered by continuous popups asking me for permission for every single photo, video, or location access. Window Vista proved people have their limits on annoyance.
Oh yeah, Chuck! Way to go after the important issues of the day!
(Yes, iOS and Android have security bugs and I'm glad people find them and publicize them so they are fixed ASAP. But Senators should (and do!) have much better things to be doing. Chuck is essentially trolling here to get attention for himself. BTW, I don't hate or love the left or the right. I consider almost all politicians to be almost sub-human -- lesser than common thieves but nevertheless think they serve a necessary purpose. I think Chuck is better than most -- not saying much -- and even voted for him in a lesser-of-two-evils situation when I lived in NY. But this is pathetic pandering, nothing more.)
(Yes, iOS and Android have security bugs and I'm glad people find them and publicize them so they are fixed ASAP. But Senators should (and do!) have much better things to be doing. Chuck is essentially trolling here to get attention for himself. BTW, I don't hate or love the left or the right. I consider almost all politicians to be almost sub-human -- lesser than common thieves but nevertheless think they serve a necessary purpose. I think Chuck is better than most -- not saying much -- and even voted for him in a lesser-of-two-evils situation when I lived in NY. But this is pathetic pandering, nothing more.)
Scumbag politicians
Politicians: act outraged because brand new operating systems do not magically anticipate every possible privacy breach -- then try to pass laws allowing the government to spy, jail, and kill us on a whim - that is when they aren't passing laws paid for by media companies to convict kids of felonies and ruin the Internet because of their outdated business models.
Politicians: act outraged because brand new operating systems do not magically anticipate every possible privacy breach -- then try to pass laws allowing the government to spy, jail, and kill us on a whim - that is when they aren't passing laws paid for by media companies to convict kids of felonies and ruin the Internet because of their outdated business models.
This is an absurd and illogical position perpetuated by the Fox Republican "speaking points".
Let's say you have a senior executive earning $2 million in salary that is taxed at the highest marginal rate of 35% (which translates to an effective rate of 33.67%). Now we lower taxes for the rich and reduce the federal taxes to 32% or 28%. The only way you can maintain that this creates jobs is by the assumption that the additional take home of either $50K or $122K will be spent and that spending will create jobs (the assumes that the entire $2 million constitutes taxable income). But most economists will tell you that it doesn't get spent. It might get invested, but that investment won't create jobs in the current environment because most public companies are already sitting on tons of cash that isn't getting spent (except perhaps on bonuses or stock buy-backs) so they don't need the additional investment to hire people.
Now let's go the other way: Let's say you raised that 35% to 39.6%, which is scheduled to happen next year. That's an extra $85K in taxes for that guy who makes $2 million. Tell me how that raises costs for the poor. Do you think that CEO is going to raise prices on the products/services his company produces because his personal net post-tax income went down by $85,000?
But if the Government got that extra $85K, that could pay the salary for an extra school teacher, public hospital worker, fire fighter, police officer, or for some road paving, a school repair, part of a sewer pipe replacement, etc. That does indeed most directly create jobs. And they are jobs that pay taxes as well.
And when you reduce taxes on the middle-class and poor, that also creates jobs because most spend 100% of what they take home.
One might be able to make the case that reducing corporate taxes creates jobs, except that corporations are making record profits and sitting on record amounts of cash and they're still not hiring.
Of course most super high-income people make most of their money on investments rather than salary and pay the incredibly low long-term capital gains rate of only 18%, far less than most middle-class salaried people. (How Mr. Romney got his effective rate down to 14% is beyond my understanding, since I didn't think you could take any deductions on capital gains.)
During the Nixon administration, the top marginal rate was around 70%. During the Reagan administration, which all Conservatives claim to worship, the top marginal rate was 50%. It's now 35% (although going up for 2013 unless Congress changes it again).
Conservatives like to say that the country is bankrupt because we have less coming in than we're spending. They're correct: you can't fight two wars and lower taxes and come out ahead. That was the myth of the Bush administration. But we have less coming in because the rich haven't paid their fair share in years in spite of the fact that wealth has become incredibly concentrated and the rich have gotten much richer while the middle-class and poor haven't seen real income gains in decades.
Next year's supposed tax increase seeks to rectify some of that, although the problem from my standpoint is that it also raises the rates on the lowest tax brackets. If one earns less than $12,400 (head of household), their taxes go up 5%, which is a 50% tax increase for them. IMO, that's criminal. But let's cry for the poor Wall Street bonus babies instead.
I would maintain that in markets where rich and poor live and work in close proximity, like New York, the rich raise prices for everyone. If there's enough rich people in a given neighborhood, it raises co-op/condo/rental prices across the board and it also raises the cost of basic services for everyone, like the price of food, restaurants, dry-cleaners, even the price of a bagel, etc. because the rich are not price sensitive. This is the real story of trickle-down economics...income doesn't trickle down, but costs do. This is why within another ten years, there won't be any middle-class people left in Manhattan below 125th street, except those who already have paid off their mortgages. New housing in Manhattan generally starts at over $2 million and the average price of all apartments in Manhattan is about $1.4 million. So as the rich get richer, we're going to have an even more fragmented and isolated society.
The good news is that everyone's photos are copyrighted upon their creation, you'd have to do something silly like sign a creative commons or other agreement to forfeit your rights to the images. Unless the app in question had something in it's TOS upon launch or with an account registration, where you agreed to an unconditional license for any material uploaded (ie. Facebook).
I think you meant to say that you registered your photos with the Library of Congress which is really just a formal record of the copyrighted works. Kinda like a birth certificate, you're still birthed (as in squirted out of mommy) even if you don't have one on file. Having the registration sure makes things easier down the road though, ditto with copyright registrations.
While there is an automatic copyright, it has no meaning because you can't sue over the violation unless it's registered with the LoC. And if it is registered, you can only sue in Federal Court. And the average person don't want to go through the hassle of registering every silly photo that they take.
I think a lot of the posters are missing the point. It's not that an app has access to your photos or address book. It's that the app sends that data back to the app's publisher or to Google or to whoever and uses it for purposes for which I have not given permission.
So sure, if I buy some photo app, I'd want it to access my photos. If I buy some app that needs to send things to people, I want it to use my address book. If the purposes are obvious, like the above, I don't even want it to ask my permission. But I don't want the app to send my address book or photos or anything else to the application developer or to some advertising server without my express permission. I don't understand why people think Schumer is a hack for raising these issues. Apple and Google blew this.
Campaign for Chuck much? Geez, somebody took this personal.
I have news for you. Every application you ever downloaded or installed on your computer has access to your entire file system. It's been this way for decades. Should we all panic now because our mobile phones do the same thing? Probably not. Software vendors know you will stop buying their products if they did something malicious with that access. To your point, I was not attacking your good friend Chuck here. No matter who had come out and said this I'd have said the same thing: Senator is just making a ploy for some press time. To me this is a non-issue since I have lived with it for as long as I can remember on every computer or mobile phone I have ever owned. I think Congress can spot a media event when they see one and they love to jump in the spotlight as the defenders of our rights. Yay for congress. I'm pretty sure the existing bad press on this will more than suffice to get Apple to act. Google on the other hand allows direct file system access on Android by design (just like a computer). It may be harder for Google to protect things.