The news and the Internet overall has been awash today with stories of Apple risking customer annoyance by tracking everywhere its devices go. I say “its devices” – I mean “your devices”, since once you’ve paid for them they don’t belong to Apple any more.
Essentially the story is that when you synchronise your iPhone or iPad with your computer, not only does it check all the music, apps, contacts or other information it has loaded is up to date, it does a quick download of information about where it’s been. The computer then knows where you’ve been with the device and after a quick upload, so does Apple.
A lot of people are seeing pretty sinister motives in this. Apple, for its part, is pointing to its standard terms and conditions which somewhere in there tells you that you might have your device’s movements tracked. The same clause tells you that this gathered information might be shared with third parties.
Of course this sort of information is a marketer’s dream. If they can pick up that I claim to go to the gym often but in fact spend all of my time in the coffee bar not doing any exercise, then they know that a mailshot about chocolate brownies is going to yield better results than an offer on personal training. Whether or not Apple is actually selling this information at the moment, it would be insanity not to put a bit in the contract that allows for it in future.
But this isn’t really what the location stuff is all about with Apple. Its financial results published today confirm that it’s phenomenally successful already, it doesn’t need this extra income.
But Apple needs to be able to share some of this information. There are social networks which base themselves entirely on where a member is at the time. FourSquare, Facebook Places, they both get people discounts as long as they’re logged in and their accounts announce their location to the world. If Apple were to allow you to install FourSquare onto your device but then find, contractually, that it couldn’t share your location with the people behind that app, it just wouldn’t work.
The other thing the iPhone and iPad can do is to tell you where it is. Seriously, you lose it, you go to the website and ask it to “find my iPhone” or “find my iPad” and it’ll tell you where it is, as long as you haven’t asked it not to.
This is very useful. It makes a valuable piece of information loss-proof. It’s almost certain that this is all Apple is doing at the moment with all this private information.
It just would have been politic to make it all a bit clearer at the outset.
Guy Clapperton
