Thursday, June 4

Apple CEO Tim Cook's ringing speech is a polite way of saying Americans are risking their freedom for freebies

BES -- Before Edward Snowden -- American users of free internet-related services had an excuse in that many of us (this writer included) had no idea how much of our privacy we were giving up to use the services.  This ignorance was cynically manipulated by defenders of NSA's massive data mining operations after Snowden exposed them. They told the public that Americans knowingly give away their private information and that the idea of privacy was passé.

It turned out neither statement was true.              

But now we are confronted with a new iteration of the old saw that freedom is never free.  In a speech the other night about privacy and encryption, Tim Cook laid out Apple's business model, which stands in sharp contrast to the model that lulls people into believing they're getting something for nothing but actually represents data mining gone berserk

Yet Cook is just making the conundrum clear. We are fast approaching decisions about the cost of internet services we take for granted are 'free,' iincluding news reporting made available simply for the cost of internet access -- a revenue stream that doesn't benefit the news providers.

There are no easy answers to the conundrum, and the questions aren't limited to tech services. Recently a drug chain offered an additional 20 percent discount on a store discount card -- but activation required going onto the internet and providing personal information that hadn't been required to obtain the orignal discount card.  

In short, the rationale for discounting merchandise had evolved:  no longer was it simply a way to draw customers to the store.  Now they wanted more of the customer's private information.

Is all this just a kind of marketing fad?  Have retailers been sold on the idea that they can substitute the profits they derive from data mining for profits from better service and better products?

If so, they need to stop and consider where all this data mining is leading. The end of the road is a dystopia that they and their families will suffer from as much as the customer.

My thanks to Matthew Panzarino at Tech Crunch for explaining Apple's position so clearly. Even though he's writing for a tech-oriented website, Panzarino makes sure the reader doesn't have to be a techie to understand Tim Cook's points. Great journalism. And a great public service. Delivered without demanding my personal information.  Here, excerpts from Panzarino's report, which should be read in its entirety. It's an important writing on an important issue.    
Matthew Panzarino
June 3, 2015
Tech Crunch
Cook then switched gears to talk about encryption, directly addressing the efforts by policymakers to force Apple to offer a ‘master key’ that would allow government agencies access to consumer devices.
Matthew Panzarino's closing observation is memorable:  

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