A Reality Check on Righteous Privacy Indignation

“According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, some of my
iPhone apps are spying on me. They apparently know when I use them,
my location, my age and my gender. Then they send it all to
marketing companies. This wouldn’t happen if we’d all pay full
price for everything we use and download. But given the chance,
despite the anger over this violation of privacy, how many would
really do that?

“When I first heard about The Wall Street Journal’s expose
article last weekend, titled “Your Apps Are Watching You,” I was
outraged: My iPhone apps where sending my iPhone 4’s Unique Device
Identifier (UDID) to marketing companies? They were tracking my
location and sharing it with advertising networks? They were
sharing my age and gender and ZIP code? And when I spent a certain
amount of time navigating some apps, they were tattling on me —
communicating how much time I spent with them, how deep into the
app I delved? And after they sent this off willy nilly to various
marketing companies, the marketing companies built profiles and
judged me, then slapped me into a category to sell to
advertisers?!”

Complete
Story