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Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

No. Are you suggesting that Apple's highest moral obligation is preventing the collection of data that might conceivably expose their users' wrong-doing—e.g. their betrayal of their spouse?

To be clear, the collection of the data is only a "problem" if it exposes you as a liar. And it's not a "problem" for the person who was lied to; it's a boon. And if you weren't cheating, well, showing your call or location logs might be a way of saying, "Look, I have nothing to hide."

Privacy vs. disclosure of data is a complicated issue. It involves issues of personal autonomy as well as trust. Do you give up some autonomy because you know that people know what you're doing at any moment? Of course. But there is often a pay-off to doing so: people actually trust you.

Life is complicated, and you can't down-vote moral complexity out of life, no matter how high your karma is.

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"collection of data that might conceivably expose their users' wrong-doing"

So to answer his question honestly: Yes, you are implying exactly that.

No, I am not. I wrote, "Life is complicated."

Turn the issue around: how would you feel if Apple bent over backwards to help your partner fuck other people behind your back and leave no trace?

I don't know why I'm bothering to write this, because you seem resistant to the concept of moral subtlety, but I will anyway: Studies have been done that show that morally equivalent choices can be posed in ways that lead to people using different moral heuristics for making decisions and reliably making different choices.

People move through the world and leave traces of that movement. Where should device makers stand on the continuum between recording everything and distributing it to everyone and recording nothing (and erasing everything it possibly can) and making sure that no information about a user's actions can leak out.

Do you understand that this is not a binary choice? Do you understand that there are outcomes that you and I can agree to call good or bad that can result from making a decision anywhere along this continuum? Do you understand that there is no easy solution? Do you get it?

I don't see where and why you find the need to make such as Shakespearian dilemma out of it. Nokia, RIM, Android, you-name-it, don't record your position with a day to day resolution. There is no need to do that. Apple does it; it does so in an almost hidden way and without apparent reason. Anyone should at the very least be quite suspicious or concerned about it while you seem to come up with a lot of ethical bullshit.

There is an easy solution. Apple has no business making moral judgements about my right to privacy. They should do everything in their power to protect it unless some lawful authority says otherwise in the course of a criminal investigation.

In such an investigation, your location history could be obtained from the mobile provider. Therefore this additional data could only possibly be of use to people who have no right to it in the first place.

So to phrase it in your language; yes, Apple's highest moral obligation is preventing the collection of unnecessary data about me, and indeed to tell me what it is collecting, why, and to whom it will be disclosed. In fact, where I live, all these principles are enshrined in a law called the Data Protection Act.

In the UK and the wider EU at least, Apple could be in a considerable amount of trouble for collecting this data.

Edit x2: grammar.

"to help your partner fuck other people behind your back and leave no trace?"

You really are hung up on this "nothing to hide" deal aren't you?

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