Tag: Doc Searls

[Link] John Gruber on Doc Sears on Apple

A few days ago, Doc Searls wrote a multi-part post on Apple’s advertisting & adtech surveillance. John Gruber challenges his argument:

For all the criticism Apple has faced from the ad tech industry over this feature, it’s fun to see criticism that Apple isn’t going far enough. But I don’t think Searls’s critique here is fair. Permission to allow tracking is not on by default — what is on by default is permission for the app to ask. Searls makes that clear, I know, but it feels like he’s arguing as though apps can track you by default, and they can’t.

The fact that they both blog in public, regularly, makes it possible to ‘listen’ in on these conversations & learn a thing or ten.

 

 

[Link] Doc Searls on Apple vs Adtech

Doc Searls isn’t convinced that Apple is fully serious about privacy:

If Apple was fully serious, your iPhone would be set to not allow tracking in the first place. All those trackers would come pre-vaporized. And Apple never would have given every iPhone an IDFA—ID For Advertisers—in the first place…

Defaulting the master Tracking setting to ON means Felix has to tap “Ask App Not To Track” for every single one of those hangers-on. Meaning that one click won’t vaporize all those apps at once. Just one at a time. This too is misleading as well as unserious.

Everything’s amazing, and yet everything’s mundane

Progress is how the miraculous becomes mundane. Many of our ancestors would have given limbs for the privilege of seeing what’s on the other side of our window shades in the sky. Glad all we need is to give up our cynicism about flying.

from a blog post by the inimitable Doc Searls. 

Very often, I forget that if only I stop staring at some screen or book I’m engrossed in & look up, something fascinating is happening all around me. Whether it is people’s conversations, or Nature’s thandava, something always is happening. The mere fact that I can type this on some plastic-y object, & things magically appear on a screen that’s glowing, & with the push of a button, all 12 of my blog readers can see my thoughts – isn’t that miraculous?  

What other miracles have I missed today because I’m so busy pretending to be the center of the universe? What have you missed?

Bonus link: Everything’s amazing, but nobody’s happy

Personal Tracking. Unwanted. Big Data. [Blog Post]

Doc Sears detects a change in people’s attitudes towards unwanted tracking of their digital activities, & has several links in that blog post. He quotes Erik Cecil :

“The backwash that’s coming is a tsunami that hasn’t hit yet. Right now it’s a wide swell over deep water. But you can tell it’s coming because the tide is suspiciously far out. So we have all these Big Data marketing types, out there on the muddy flats, raking up treasures of exposed personal data. They don’t see that this is not the natural way of things, or that it’s temporary. But the tidal wave is coming. And when it finally hits, watch out.