Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I’m pretty deep into the Apple ecosystem and enjoy using their products, but I find it difficult to argue that Siri isn’t terrible when compared to Alexa or Google Assistant.
1 Like
Regarding the FCC fines, and the location data used by AT&T, Verizon, etc. - couldn’t Apple require, as part of its contracts with the carriers, that location data cannot be sold or shared by the carrier except in specifically enumerated kinds of circumstances (like emergencies, 911, and so forth).
I would think that Apple has some tools within reach to encourage the carriers to not do this kind of behavior. Like, for example, not providing the next-gen iPhone to them.
1 Like
Leo’s recommendation of the Loctote packs look great. I recall Mike Elgan noting that Barcelona thieves have gotten in the habit of cutting through a pack while it’s being worn. The cut-resistant material and hardened seams would probably have the bad guys seek out someone else.
It is between the customer and the carrier, it has nothing to do with Apple. That said, consumer law, here in Europe means that they can’t sell your location information, call logs, surfing history etc. anyway.
1 Like
Except Apple has been doing all sorts of things to influence the customer/carrier relationship through the years – all the way back to the original iPhone. Remember: carriers used to be an intermediary for phone OS updates. An update couldn’t be issued without “approval” from the carrier. Jobs stopped that wiith the IPhone. Today, it’s unimaginable that some lowly carrier would control software updates to any smart phone.
But the carrier knows where the customer is based on the cell towers, not information coming from the device, Apple has no influence over that, that is the carrier’s information to do with as they please, at least in the US.
And Apple is now on all carriers, so they no longer have the exclusivity trump card. We also have a very good Android alternative ecosystem, just waiting to snap up the left overs, if Apple stumbles. The tables have turned in that respect.
Well - they could threaten to pull the iPhone off of any carrier that continues to sell the information, but I realistically don’t see that happening. Then again - with the number of times Alex and others have said they won’t buy cars from certain vehicle manufacturers because of the lack of CarPlay support, I could see some people being willing to switch carriers if the iPhone was no longer available.
Cell phone vendors – all cell phone vendors – used to have total influence over distributing the phone OS to customers. Apple had no influence, but thay changed all that. They literally changed the contract with the cellular providers so they were out of the loop for software updates. Apple insisted that they were responsible for providing the software updates for their phones. They got that in the contract with Cingular – after 18 months (!!!) of negotiations. Boom. The world changed. In hindsight, it’s completely obvious that the cellular carriers had no business injecting themselves in the OS release procedures.
There’s no reason that Apple couldn’t also get a similar contractural agreement with carriers that they would sell no data whatsoever to any third party. They could even continue to do business with carriers that wouldn’t sign up for that agreement. The signees would get a Certificate of Carrier Privacy from Apple; the others would not.
Why do you think this would be an Apple-only thing? Don’t you think customers everywhere would like to have the option to have their carrier metadata be private?
1 Like
I don’t see it. The carriers in Europe can’t sell the information, because it is illegal.
In the USA they can sell the information, because it is legal to do so. Apple just can’t put on that sort of pressure to close areas of revenue that are totally legal, they’d have to compensate the carriers for the lost revenue and they wouldn’t do that. And, at the end of the day, Apple is a business and they are looking to maximise revenues for themselves, with the Chinese market shrinking, they aren’t going to cut off their nose to spite their face.
The only way to stop this behaviour is to make it illegal. It has worked in other parts of the world.
1 Like
That would be like saying "if you don’t do something we don’t really care about, we’ll blow our toe off!!! 
1 Like