Creepy? | Hacker News Reader

Creepy?

daringfireball.net

20 points16g19 comments

I can't read Gruber's posts anymore. The inability to respond to his specious claims is infuriating. For example in this post, the policy does not explicitly state the ability to opt out. Also he ignores the studies showing that with large enough data sets, individuals can be identified by their behavioral patterns, nullifying Apple's claim to the contrary. Gruber constantly passes off pejorative arguments as cogent analysis, yet unbelievably is still well respected in most circles. I weep for the loss of independent reasoning.

Exactly. He is willing to interject his own responses, but unwilling to entertain comments to his own posts.

Aside from that, your phone (whether you opt-out or not) being able to update its manufacturer (not your carrier) on your whereabouts at any given time IS creepy.

Apple asks now, and Steve Jobs says that Apple asks now, but is it illegal for them to change that policy? The only thing forcing them to include an opt-out is user backlash against the TOS change. Further down the road, when iOS disables opt-out because location-aware ads make Apple way too much money, I'm sure there'll be more justification from Gruber and other Apple evangelists.

In the future, Apple could install a small packet of poisonous gas that would be triggered on the first received phone call 10 hours after jailbreaking the device. I mean, they haven't, but they could do that. And that is creepy.

The financial benefit associated with iAds and location awareness provide an incentive. Where's the incentive to poison jailbreakers? One is significantly more plausible than the other.

Yes! Apple is indeed responsible for disavowing ALL PLAUSIBLE threats they could be involved in! BURN THEM!

Here we are in 2010, in a world replete with democratized media, where any person with access to a computer — even without owning one — can sign up for a free email address at any number of free providers, and then sign up for a free blog service from an even more impressive array of providers, and speak their mind and refer to other such pages using the magic of Uniform Resource Locators. And, in this world, we have such an overgrown sense of entitlement that we get upset when someone chooses to reserve their blog as their own and doesn't allow us to take a piss in their pages.

Absolutely incredible that this is called an "inability to respond". Exactly how low does the bar need to be set before one is willing to lift one's leg to step over it?

Gruber links to people who have chosen to respond to him in their own blogs on a regular basis, and this has allowed me to discover blogs I may never have discovered before. It also drives traffic to them that they may never have seen before. What's so wrong with him expecting you to engage him as a peer?

Hypothetical answer: I'm not a blogger, nor do I want to be one. Gruber is free to do as he wants, of course - he is perfectly free to only respond to emails encoded with EBCDIC, if he really feels like it - but that doesn't somehow remove any legitimacy from complaints against him.

Secondly, I suspect the desire to comment on his blog arises more from a wish to engage (read: inform) other readers, rather than Gruber himself.

And your point is? Nobody is entitled to comment on someone else's site. "Lack of comments" is simply a bullshit criticism.

No-one is entitled to have a window manager on Linux either, but I'd probably still be using a Mac if there weren't any. The OP of this thread is not, to my understanding, making a moral claim about how Gruber should or shouldn't have comments - he's saying that the inability to comment, combined with Gruber's factual inaccuracies, frustrates him sufficiently that he no longer pays much attention to the blog. Is he allowed to make that decision? Or is Gruber entitled to his attention?

he no longer pays much attention to the blog

He pays attention enough to start comment threads about it.

That requires almost no attention at all. IIRC, that's a large part of the reason why John doesn't want comments on his blog.

You'll have to take that up with him; I'm afraid that my insight into the minds of complete strangers is rather circumscribed.

I was not claiming I want him to add comments, I was explaining why I can't stomach reading his blog. A claim which is obviously contradicted by my act of posting a comment.

It's fitting though, that someone as uncritically admiring of Apple and its culture of control and secrecy would take this approach with his own blog.

I don't click on DF links anymore. His tap-dancing apologia are predictable and tiresome and disingenuous and I don't use Apple stuff anymore so I don't need his take on the iFoo of the moment.

See? Look at the meme spread. It's like a political talking point. Some Frank Luntz somewhere started this idea that an easy way to write off a commentator you don't like is to remark about his lack of blog comments, and off we are to the races.

It's quite fitting. John Gruber is the Fox and Friends of the tech industry.

I write off Gruber precisely because he's so hyper-politicized that there's no need to actually read him and because he's so tragically wrong about so many things that really matter. That he disallows comments on his blog just happens to fit with the rest of his M.O. Good job mischaracterizing my post though.

I'd be a lot more impressed with the rest of the HN Apple mafia if they'd stop modding down anything critical of Apple and take the time to post some reasoned, articulate rebuttals.

Since the early days of iPhone you could collect near real-time location data on individual users by having your app ping location once they give basic location permission.

Seems like this privacy policy is a clarification on an existing process, and maybe necessary since the advent of new background services make is easier to collect in real time?

That's precisely what Gruber is saying, and though I initially read that portion of the TOS with the "creepy" interpretation where Apple will track you constantly for some nefarious iAds-related purpose, I now think your reading is probably right.

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