Apple has recently made a public statement, assuring its consumers about the company’s continued fight against any sort of user tracking, even if it is state sponsored.
The company’s coming right off the heels of a recent lawsuit it slapped on Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group, which is notorious for making software that can hack into iOS and MacOS. NSO Group then sells this data to governments, allowing them to actively spy on their own citizens, which makes the Group a narc of the worst order. Snitches may get stitches, but sometimes they get lawsuits asking for coverage in damages over USD $75,000. At any rate, Apple’s major gripe with the company came from how it not only developed hacking software actively aimed at it, but also sold it to governments that have no right to snoop in on their own people. Naturally, and also in the interest of generating favorable public interest for the lawsuit, Apple decided to make its stance on government sponsored spyware very apparent and clear.
Tracking and Transparency have done wonders in order to curb the likes of Facebook and other third party apps from obtaining location data and browser history so they can generate targeted advertisements. Of course, advertisers find loopholes every now and then, but users have been granted a rather loud and impressionable voice in determining how their own personal data is used by corporations. However, state sponsored data dives are quite a different behemoth as opposed to your average third party advertiser fishing for cookies and locations stats.
State sponsored spyware is often illicit, yet deemed acceptable since it can be claimed to be operated in the interests of national security. Of course, what is defined as a matter of national security is entirely up to the state itself, with no input from the general populace. A Muslim individual looking up verses from the Quran might very well be considered to be a threat to the USA’s precious liberty and honor in the wrong eyes (which are honestly everywhere). A black man going through chatrooms and planning an organized protest against racism and inequality can be considered to be a threat to national security. Hell, when Ronald Reagan was in office, people were being persecuted left and right for even implying that capitalism is a toxic, unstable mess. Which, thankfully, is a bit more widely accepted nowadays without too many people being carted off to jail in the process.
Apple’s strategy for state sponsored spyware is simple: if you can’t beat ‘em, at least warn everyone else about them. Far from selling out or becoming a narc, Apple actively sends out notifications when state sponsored spyware gets used against the general populace. Is this any useful? Not really, but a heads up from the company is sometimes all it takes for a person to clean up their digital act by a marginally small amount.
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The company’s coming right off the heels of a recent lawsuit it slapped on Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group, which is notorious for making software that can hack into iOS and MacOS. NSO Group then sells this data to governments, allowing them to actively spy on their own citizens, which makes the Group a narc of the worst order. Snitches may get stitches, but sometimes they get lawsuits asking for coverage in damages over USD $75,000. At any rate, Apple’s major gripe with the company came from how it not only developed hacking software actively aimed at it, but also sold it to governments that have no right to snoop in on their own people. Naturally, and also in the interest of generating favorable public interest for the lawsuit, Apple decided to make its stance on government sponsored spyware very apparent and clear.
Tracking and Transparency have done wonders in order to curb the likes of Facebook and other third party apps from obtaining location data and browser history so they can generate targeted advertisements. Of course, advertisers find loopholes every now and then, but users have been granted a rather loud and impressionable voice in determining how their own personal data is used by corporations. However, state sponsored data dives are quite a different behemoth as opposed to your average third party advertiser fishing for cookies and locations stats.
State sponsored spyware is often illicit, yet deemed acceptable since it can be claimed to be operated in the interests of national security. Of course, what is defined as a matter of national security is entirely up to the state itself, with no input from the general populace. A Muslim individual looking up verses from the Quran might very well be considered to be a threat to the USA’s precious liberty and honor in the wrong eyes (which are honestly everywhere). A black man going through chatrooms and planning an organized protest against racism and inequality can be considered to be a threat to national security. Hell, when Ronald Reagan was in office, people were being persecuted left and right for even implying that capitalism is a toxic, unstable mess. Which, thankfully, is a bit more widely accepted nowadays without too many people being carted off to jail in the process.
Apple’s strategy for state sponsored spyware is simple: if you can’t beat ‘em, at least warn everyone else about them. Far from selling out or becoming a narc, Apple actively sends out notifications when state sponsored spyware gets used against the general populace. Is this any useful? Not really, but a heads up from the company is sometimes all it takes for a person to clean up their digital act by a marginally small amount.
Read next: Supply Shortages Result in Less Drastic Value Deprecation for iPhone 13