iPhone location tracking: geeks hiding that Android is bigger violator
When the headlines arose across the geek techosphere this week
about the
iPhone's nasty habit of collecting and reporting location data, headlines which were then mindlessly parroted by the mainstream press, I couldn't but think the obvious: I'll bet the Android platform does the exact same thing, and the geeks pushing this story know it, and yet they've conveniently left that part out. Turns out I was wrong: Android is actually a much bigger offender. According to industry expert Christopher Soghoian, the iPhone reports your location data to
Apple twice a day, but Android reports your location data back to Google several times per
hour. But naturally, when the geeks who control the tech headlines went to write those headlines, they became "iPhone records your location, secretly reports it back to Apple" with no mention of their pet Android platform anywhere to be seen. And I'm not surprised in the least.
Don't get me wrong: Apple and Google are both in the wrong here, clearly wrong on a moral level, and if they're not wrong legally, then the laws need to be changed immediately. Regardless of the reason for this data collection, even if it's as naively innocent as the companies' desire to figure where to tell the cellular carriers to build more towers or some such, it's not right – particularly without having warned users or given them the opportunity to turn it off. And the fact that the iPhone only uploads this data a couple times per day as opposed to the Android doing so repeatedly all day long doesn't mean Apple is less guilty. But it does make the headline writers even more guilty.
Any random headcount of smartphone users, if carried out among the true mainstream population and nowhere near the self-imposed bubble most geeks live inside of, will reveal that most consumers overwhelmingly identify more with the iPhone platform than the Android platform, regardless of which they're currently using. Ask the typical non-geek Android user why they're using Android, and the answers are most often "Because my preferred carrier offers it" or "Because the Best Buy geek insisted I buy it" or even "What's an Android?" But back inside that geek bubble, Android is a phone descended directly from the gods. It's programmable. It's hackable. It wastes no time on concepts like ease of use, which geeks find too restricting, and instead focuses on delivering infinite theoretical features whether any of them are in any way practical or not. It's why non-geek consumers buy one Android phone but, upon realizing the kind of geek-leaning nonsense they've been duped into using, rarely buy a second one (multiple studies have Android platform retention rate in the twentieth percentile). And it's why geeks will stop at almost nothing to protect their pet Android platform.
At a time when products like the iPhone, iPad, and even the Kindle are bringing an end to the era in which technology products had long been designed specifically with geeks in mind and to the detriment of the mainstream, geeks now feel that their way of life is being threatened. Thus they cling to the Android platform as if it's their last best hope for retaining their dominance over the consumer technology landscape. Conveniently for them, nearly all technology coverage, from traditional tech publications and tech blogs to even the tech reporting being done at major mainstream media outlets, is controlled by the geeks. After all, just try to imagine a non-geek growing up to become a technology reporter, and it's easy to understand why nearly all those covering tech are in fact tech geeks.
And at a time when their way of life is on the line, the geeks have gone increasingly over the top in both attacking the anti-geek iPhone and iOS platforms at every turn as well as shielding their favored Android platform. These are the individuals who concocted the "iPhone 4 antenna issue" while conveniently failing to mention that every smartphone, including all Android based phones, can also be made to lose a piece of their reception by being grabbed in a certain way. And now they've turned this disturbingly important privacy and spying issue into yet another self serving propaganda vehicle. Instead of accurately reporting that multiple major smartphone OS vendors are secretly tracking their customers, the geeks instead misreported this as being an Apple-specific issue. Their hope, apparently, is that it'll cause mainstream consumers to fear buying an iPhone and settle for an Android phone instead. After all, any time a geek can trick a consumer into buying a geek-leaning product, it's a good day. Safety in numbers. And just maybe, said consumer will magically become a fellow geek through the mere exposure of using a smartphone with a hacker operating system.
It's not that these geeks think Android can take over in a way Linux failed to. No, these geeks are insulated so deeply inside their bubble that they think Linux did take over. And now they think that if they can just keep misreporting the facts, if they can just keep making the iPhone and iOS look bad enough in the eyes of consumers, their pet Android platform will continue to rise by default. Sadly, to a large extent, it's been working. The question is whether Apple will find a way to fight back against the propaganda, or whether consumers will continue to figure out that the geeks are not on their side, or perhaps both. But in the mean time Apple isn't helping itself by being as immoral as Google when it comes to tracking customer location; such immoral actions on Apple's part merely serve to give the geeks more fuel for their immoral self-serving misreporting of the tech landscape.
