Welcome to Brown’s Bytes! Your weekly insight from Mobliciti’s CTO Andy Brown. Follow #brownsbytes
29th January 2021
Things are getting real in Silicon Valley… a real Clash of the Titans is warming up.
Last year some of you will recall that we published a Byte about the early Beta releases of iOS14. In it, I discussed the new privacy features built into the operating system by Apple to empower end-users with visibility on precisely what data their devices are giving away and to give them further controls to block it if they wanted to.
In 2020, there was a flurry of stories as the Betas showed which apps were collecting data and what data they wanted (either deliberately, or even possibly through the lazy use of various SDKs).
It caused a LOT of noise and, in the end, Apple decided to give everyone a bit longer to adapt to the changes in the OS and pulled these features from the final iOS14 release.
Enter Facebook…
Apple’s ideology of data privacy is clearly completely at odds with many other tech firms these days, but the flag bearer for hoovering up personal data is Facebook. And, it’s fair to say they are not best pleased with potentially losing a massive chunk of data coming in. They’ve gone on record stating that all of this is “trying to take the world back 10 or 20 years”.
This has hit the mainstream press again following a speech from Tim Cook on “Data Privacy Day” yesterday where he took aim at companies that are “built on misleading users, on data exploitation” without actually naming any companies directly! It’s worth checking out his full speech as it really does bring to life the fundamental ideologies behind two of Silicon Valley’s monster organisations:
Apple – Buy our hardware and software and we’ll look after your privacy for you.
Facebook – Your data pays for our services.
Tim Cook reiterated Apple’s plans to roll out the OS features in “early Spring”. Meanwhile, Facebook is reported to be planning their counter-attack with an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
This is going to get messy and could rumble on for years…
Anti-Trust? An ironic name really isn’t it… who would you trust between these two!?
And, Finally
iOS 14.4 was released this week containing fixes for a couple of zero-day exploits that have been detected in the wild… as is our usual advice, you really need to get this one pushed out.
