[LINK] Iphone/iPad changes: Draft APF Policy re Location Data

[David Vaile]

Hi Graham, Roger, all, 

That phrase caught my eye too. I suspect the use of "crowd-sourced" here is misleading, an abuse of this cuddly term in an apparently deliberate attempt to imply the crowd's knowledge and support for the activity when apparently the users were unaware of the collection, and thus could not have intended to support it. 

The crowd (of humans) played no conscious part in the collection of this, yet another potentially dangerous global database of where everyone's insecure WiFi access points are to be found. 

Given a choice, with full information of risks and benefits to various parties, some of the crowd (the users of WiFi-enabled iOS devices) may have chosen to participate, others to decline, and others still to lobby Apple or governments for protections against such secret unauthorised centralised mass collection of insecure WiFi access point info.  

It is really the "crowd" of devices which "sourced" this information -- but these i-devices don't have minds of their own, they are not even semi-autonomous robots, they are pretty direct agents of both the various software vendors and the user (to the extent the user is aware and in control). 

Where the user is NOT aware and in control, a crowd of devices resembles a zombie bot net: your computer under the secret control of a bot-herder in some far off land, surreptitiously borrowing its capacity to pursue interests not necessarily related to your own. 

Perhaps a more accurate term would be "zombie-bot-sourced" info?

David


On 7/05/11 9:16 PM, Graham Greenleaf wrote:
> Why would it refer to a *crowd-sourced* location database if it was
> not extracting location data from the crowd? It is a suspicious
> phrase in this context.
>
> At 3:45 PM +1000 7/5/11, Roger Clarke wrote:
>> At 1:00 PM +1000 7/5/11, Graham Greenleaf wrote:
>>> FYI: As of this morning, iTunes offers me new iPad and iPhone
>>> software which says it 'changes to the IOS crowd-sourced location
>>> database cache including:
>>> - reduces the size of the cache
>>> - no longer backs the cache up to iTunes
>>> - deletes the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off'