Apple Life+

[rslade]

Apple has always had partisans with a devotion bordering on fanaticism.  (Although UNIX is the one, true operating system, and Thompson is its prophet, it is Apple that has inspired the most hard core religious wars in computerdom.)  Apple started out with the "open" Apple ][ system.  Since then, with the Mac and various iOS devices, Apple has been firmly closed, and has increasingly tried to lock users into the Apple branded world.

With the iPod, and iTunes, Apple moved to control music, expanding somewhat into movies, with extensions into podcasts (the very word deriving from the iPod) and other audio and video content.  Then came Apple TV and Apple News.

With the recent "plus"es added to those, Apple has an enormous platform for information, entertainment, infotainment, and all manner of content delivery, all within the Apple environment and under Apple control.  Interest has been expressed in the medical benefits of the fitness tracker on the Apple watch, with its ability to alert the user (or others) when anomalous fitness readings are detected.  All of this, your phone and email contacts and traffic, and many home IoT devices, can be controlled, managed, recorded (and the details fed back to Apple) by Siri.  People have been concerned over the information that Facebook and Google collect on users: it's very difficult to believe that Apple has less access to personal user data.

Buried in yesterday's announcement was the Apple credit card.  With it's enormous cash reserves Apple can easily become a bank, and provide (and manage) all kinds of financial services.

All Apple needs is a piece of Amazon's retail sector, and perhaps a ride-sharing service (or, maybe, Apple might do an end-run, and start up a drone-sharing telepresence service) and the Apple World+ is complete.  Many science-fiction stories have posited a world where governments have become irrelevant and been replaced by corporations: I suspect Apple is closest to making this holistic control over the user's life a reality.

I expect iReligion+ to be announced any day.  Where others might go for the cut-rate "Repent and be saved!  This is an exclusive TV offer" 20% off salvation route, I presume Apple will for for the premium offer to save your soul (backed up in the clouds) to an Apple branded heaven, with easy access to forbidden fruit, as long as you only take one bite ...

[Flyslinger2]

My kids call me "fan boy" because all of my tech is Apple.  One of my favorite devices was the Newton.  It launched the whole PDA wave which I was able to ride as an entrepreneur.  Sadly, most addons for PDA's were made for the Compaq Ipaq so I ended up running with both for a while-which defeats the purpose of small compact devices when you are lugging two around.

I think Apple has always had the corner on the market of making tech for life and not tech for tech's sake.  They have always been trendy, artsy, and relational.  

[AppDefects]

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@rslade wrote:

With the recent "plus"es added to those, Apple has an enormous platform for information, entertainment, infotainment, and all manner of content delivery, all within the Apple environment and under Apple control.  Interest has been expressed in the medical benefits of the fitness tracker on the Apple watch, with its ability to alert the user (or others) when anomalous fitness readings are detected.  All of this, your phone and email contacts and traffic, and many home IoT devices, can be controlled, managed, recorded (and the details fed back to Apple) by Siri.  People have been concerned over the information that Facebook and Google collect on users: it's very difficult to believe that Apple has less access to personal user data.

Buried in yesterday's announcement was the Apple credit card.  With it's enormous cash reserves Apple can easily become a bank, and provide (and manage) all kinds of financial services.

All Apple needs is a piece of Amazon's retail sector, and perhaps a ride-sharing service (or, maybe, Apple might do an end-run, and start up a drone-sharing telepresence service) and the Apple World+ is complete.  Many science-fiction stories have posited a world where governments have become irrelevant and been replaced by corporations: I suspect Apple is closest to making this holistic control over the user's life a reality.

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Apple claims to think differently" about user privacy, but like many big tech firms out there they bank on the fact that only 1% of people (i.e., researchers) care about privacy and are willing to protect their rights. Have you ever reset your advertiser ID? Daily, Weekly, Never? Do not believe the hype, that the current round of infomercials that are saying "Apple will not see your data", "Apple will not share your data". The credit card and Apple pay are critical to their advertising business model. Sure they may claim to aggregate statistics on consumer behavior using fancy techniques like DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY, but what they really need is for you to valid their services in the minds of the Ad brokers campaign by qualifying conversion rates - that is the holy grail of advertising and billions on dollars in profit from using your data. If they really cared they would not have gone into the online Ads business in the first place. Wake up people. Care! 

[rslade]

> Flyslinger2 (Community Champion) posted a new reply in Industry News on

> My kids call me "fan boy" because all of my tech is Apple.
[...]
>   I think Apple has
> always had the corner on the market of making tech for life and not tech for
> tech's sake.

I rest my case 🙂

I have always suspected that Apple dipped their chips into something addictive
which outgassed when the machine heated up ...

====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@computercrime.org
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to
them. - Alfred Alder
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://twitter.com/rslade
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
https://is.gd/RotlWB

[rslade]

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@AppDefects wrote:

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Sure they may claim to aggregate statistics on consumer behavior using fancy techniques like DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY, but what they really need is for you to valid their services in the minds of the Ad brokers campaign by qualifying conversion rates - that is the holy grail of advertising and billions on dollars in profit from using your data.

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I'm doing research and putting together a presentation on differential privacy, and one of the interesting things I've come across is Apple's claims about it.  They may do some local differential privacy, buried in their devices and operating systems, but their presentations about it seem to be primarily the same vague promises about respecting your privacy that everyone else (including Facebook) makes.