Tuesday, March 13, 2012

What You Should Know About Apple's Location Services Feature


relatively short history of computing has been seen to go from the prevailing architecture of centralized (mainframe) to decentralized (client / server), to be hosted (remember ASP), the latest achievement, "cloud". Each incarnation was used. Electronic access to vast repositories of data and version control software is easy. Essentially a copy of the software servicing all users. Client / server computing is more power on the desktop, enabling a feature-rich and resource-intensive applications to work with great efficiency. Hosting gave corporations the opportunity to solve hard and soft costs of running business applications, freeing up corporate resources to be deployed elsewhere. And now, with cloud computing, everything seems to happen as magija.Računanje and storage environment is completely transparent to the computing public. In fact, so compelling is this new layer of abstraction between user and computer environment that is easy to forget that "computing" and participate in this process. Corporations are certainly benefactors of this sea change in computing. However, the consumer is equally endowed with this "embarrassment of riches."

There is a side effect, however, the transparency of technical wizardry. And it was complacency by consumers. It has become so easy to incorporate new technologies and achieve miracles, and more often than not does not question the actions we take and we give you permission. Yes, there are guards who keep to our interests, but much of their work lives in a technical field that never reaches the constituency they intend to represent.

Thus, the guards do what they do and the rest of us do what we say, with the promise of bigger, better, faster, lighter platform for the life of our virtual lives.

To illustrate the point, let's take a look at recent real-world example of consumers taking his eyes off the ball and taking advantage of technology providers.

Location Services from Apple is a handy capability of these devices. Location Services to determine their current location (or your device is currently located) using a combination of cellular, Wi-Fi and GPS data. This can be extremely useful if you are looking for a good restaurant nearby, or a pharmacy or gas station. Yes, there are applications for it!

It seems, however, app developers are using Location Services to transfer the address book of people, and photo and video streams, without clearly shows they intend to do. Apple rules prohibit copying of photos and address book data. However, a thorough screening process Apple uses its App Store the police did not prevent them from granting many popular applications that collect such data.

Why do these companies want to copy your photos? On May not be as nefarious as it seems. Some photo shops informacije.Slikano coordinate with the iPhone, for example, encoded a specific location where the photo was taken. This data is useful for app developers if they provide services based on where you're at that point. It is not perfect all the time, but in general, it is incredibly powerful.

Here is the rub.

It is conceivable that the app may combine information about the location of the photo coordinates to put together a map of where the customer is Apple. And if you upload your app is information on a server somewhere, then all bets are off. Apple has no control over how that information is used by a third party app developer. It seems that the gap in the rules on Apple privatnosti.Kupac can consciously decide to keep your photos on his phone, and take steps to do so. But, if it finds that the Location service skills too powerful and useful to ignore, those photos could end up ... anywhere.

ease consumer technology today, we are vaccinated against common fear that our privacy be potentially compromised. These convenient and compelling tools seem to be wrapped in a neat package of trust by default, which are always easy to decide without considering the consequences.

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