10.28.15
Apple’s Shameless Privacy Lies: The Fiction of Apple as the Very Opposite of What It Does
What a lovely company… it does photo ops like the Gates Foundation does.
“A photo op (sometimes written as photo opp), short for photograph opportunity (photo opportunity), is an arranged opportunity to take a photograph of a politician, a celebrity, or a notable event. [...] The term has acquired a negative connotation, referring to a carefully planned pseudo-event, often masqueraded as news. It is associated with politicians who perform tasks such as planting trees, picking up litter, and visiting senior citizens, often during election cycles, with the intent of photographers catching the events on film, generating positive publicity.” -Wikipedia
Summary: Apple is staging events and manufacturing misleading media reports that help portray Apple, a PRISM company, as a proponent of privacy
TRUTH be said, Apple has been cooling down its patent war against Android in recent years, so we don’t write about Apple as much as we used to. Apple’s main remaining battle now is against Samsung because Apple wants bans, extortion money, or both.
As I spend a lot of my weekends reading about privacy and security I was disturbed to see Tim Cook framed in the media (literally hundreds of articles) as fighting for people’s privacy when it fact it was him, after Steve Jobs had died, who added Apple to PRISM (Microsoft was the first to join — if not help create — PRISM). Last week and the week before that Cook presented himself and Apple as the anti-NSA (like Antichrist) when the fact of the matter is, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I ranted about this in ‘social’ media sites and maybe now is a good time to also write a short article about it. There is nothing more comical than seeing an Apple CEO ‘confronting’ Michael Rogers; it’s like a bogus, staged debate.
The NSA asked for (and got) front doors in proprietary operating systems like Vista 10 and Mac OS X, which according to the latest news [1] is full of holes.
“I don’t want a back door. I want a front door.” — Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), April 2015
BBC, a proponent of proprietary software and the “Mac versus PC” false dichotomy, has published this bizarre article which serves Apple’s promotional narrative and says: “Ordering Apple to access data against its will would be akin to making a reluctant drug company carry out a lethal injection, a US judge has said.”
Actually, this is a bogus analogy because Apple already gives the NSA access to its data and has done this for years, not because of pressure but because it hadn’t yet been found out by the public, hence the negative publicity (or “blowback”) wasn’t great enough. Right now Apple wants people to view itself as friendly to pregnant women (like the ones in China whom it ‘protects’ with suicide nets?) and a staunch support of privacy. Don’t believe this for even one second.
Proprietary operating systems such as Mac OS X and iOS have a lot of back doors, which Apple sometimes chooses to call “diagnostics”. By all means, the fiction of Apple as caring about privacy is just fiction. We need to antagonise it, or else people who really need privacy (whistleblowers for instance) will get in serious trouble. Earlier this week my sister in law in Singapore, who uses an iPhone, was mortified to learn that she was being spied on via her phone. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Mac OS X applications are leading the PC vulnerability war
GENTLEMEN ADJUST YOUR PC threat league tables. Apple has usurped Oracle as the top blight, according to security firm Secunia.
The picture is bleak across the board, and the firm found that a huge whack of PCs are are running old, beleaguered, unpatched and end-of-life versions of software. This presents a problem to the user and computers in general.
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