I was recently shipped a new iPhone, the first one I have owned. Right away it started to creep me out. When I turned it on the first thing it asked me was to login to iCloud. I didn’t know what the iCloud was but its Orwellian name made me inherently suspect. Are you telling me the information from my phone is going to be stored on a Cloud?
I’m an adult, please tell me what truth you’re trying to obscure Apple.
It turns out the iCloud is the exact opposite of a cloud in the sense that it stores information on servers located in giant warehouses. I’ve never seen a cloud that looks like that.
I saw one that looks like a giraffe once.
The iCloud syncs all of the information on your phone: Calls, texts, your location, your movements, your purchases, your photographs, your Google searches, how good you are at Words with Friends, to various remote servers where the information is stored.
That is presuming you turn it on. I didn’t want to, out of principle.
My solid two and a half hours of browsing nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and Friends had led me to take some hard ethical stances in my life. I would not be used as a pawn to provide advertising demographics, or at some point be locked up for government dissent or whatever the plan is.
They want our information and rest assured your cell carrier will provide it directly to the NSA or other law enforcement officials with no warrant or qualm, and be circuitously rewarded by not paying any taxes. Mark my words, the CEO of Verizon will be in a safe house with Dick Cheney’s Krang brain when your curtains start to melt.
The iCloud wasn’t that easy to turn off.
First of all the phone forced me to sign up for an iCloud account just to get it to start working. I immediately tried to disengage the iCloud by setting it to Off, but it kept popping up again, like a guy in denial texting a chick over and over.
Enter your iCloud password.
No!
Then I tried to do something totally unrelated.
Enter your iCloud password.
No!
It kept doing it. No joke seven times.
You just don’t get it iCloud. I just don’t like you like that!
Finally it stopped after like the tenth time. Then the phone required me to to enter my credit card number into the App Store for downloading a free app. They want it on file. You know, just in case they need it for something. Creeps.
I disabled all the iCloud features, the most notable of these being the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature. This lets you or a stalker or law enforcement agent find your phone remotely from a computer or another phone. Its a tracking device. So creepy.
I read up about how to use the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature and came across several stories about police officers using it to find missing people or stolen phones or the remaining Dead Sea Scrolls in heroic fashion.
I’m not saying these articles are harnassed by the media by design to make you feel easier about having a tracking device on you. But with an increasing police presence of armed thugs this makes me nervous.
The first thing I found when I Googled “Find My Phone and tracking” tells the story of a woman whose car went off a cliff near San Jose. What follows is cast as a heroic effort by a police officer, but poses all kinds of problems from my perspective, since I am a good driver and want the police and their ticket books and guns to stay the fuck away from me at all times.
“Police contacted the woman’s cell phone company to get a pin on her location within a 7-mile radius of downtown San Jose, which still didn’t help them find her… A police officer who met with the stepmother asked if the woman had the Find My iPhone app, which she did, on her iPad. But once the iPad was located, there was still the matter of gaining access to it. The officer was able to guess the woman’s password to her iPad based on a series of probable passwords. He guessed right, after only three to four tries and was able to use the same passcode to unlock the app. Once he activated it, a map of the location where the missing woman’s phone was popped up. Rescuers found her injured but conscious, face down in a ravine about 500 yards off an embankment.”
In U.S. v. Jones the Supreme Court ruled that its totally cool for law enforcement officials to attach a GPS device to your car and monitor your movements. This falls under the guidelines of the 4th Amendment, they say, since half of them are neo-conservative Republican shills. The ACLU is working to figure out how this applies to police using data taken remotely from your cell phone, which your carrier will give them without a warrant, and stores ostensibly for this very purpose. The majority of Americans are pissed about the NSA scandal, and conversely have no idea what you’re talking about if you bring it up.
This chart shows what your cell company does with data. Mine stores my calls, IP address info, and location of cell towers used for one year!
When your phone is turned on in your pocket it is constantly pinging your location. Your Google Phone will actually show you a map of how its keeping track of you in My Locations:
Google’s like your friend who over shares about the time he punted a cat. Being open about it doesn’t make you cooler. I know what you are thinking.
This doesn’t apply to me Matt, I’m not a criminal.
Yes, you are. Every single person reading this is a criminal. You speed in your car. You run red lights. You smoke weed. You blow lines of coke and smoke crack. You pirate movies and music. You disable the smoke detectors in airplane bathrooms. You have two beers and drive. You drink booze, throw footballs and build pit fires on the beach. You get fireworks from the Indian Reservation. You do all types of things that are illegal.
With any luck these lazy fat fuck cops, who wait at the bottom of a hill to catch you speeding, or set up DUI checkpoints will look for an even more convenient way to extract money from you.
A time when you unknowingly walk by a crack house and are immediately swarmed by the data mining team of the Police Department is not far off.
You got any crack on you?! Get down on the fucking ground!!!
The Supreme Court just ruled that cell phones may not be searched when you are pulled over for your headlight being out. Weird. A Supreme Court whose Chief Justice is openly anti privacy ruling for a common sense approach towards personal freedom? Why would they do that?
Because that’s chump change. There’s way more information on The Cloud. Wait for an under publicized hearing on this sometime in the next few years.
Let’s say you don’t believe in trends and I’m an insane conspiracy theorist. Think about it this way.
The number of people the NSA employs is thought to be around 40,000. That’s 1 in 7,500 people in the U.S.
When you factor in the FBI, CIA, the plethora of agencies overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, and the 683,000 full time law enforcement officials in the US, that puts the number of people theoretically capable of surveilling or requesting surveillance of a US citizen’s phone at around 1 in every 230 people.
If you know a hundred people, one of them definitely hates you. What are the odds you went to school with one these people? That they had a crush on you? Maybe you did a business deal with one of them, or one of their relatives?
Isn’t that argument enough against backing up all of your cell phone data on such a server, especially with the rampant ogling of titty pics in NSA offices as described by Edward Snowden?
What will I do? I don’t know. I do like the cool features on my iPhone that I never use.
I think I’ll wait until I drop it and it shatters to pieces in a few weeks and buy an old school flip phone so I can punch anyone who calls me a hipster.
Actually I’ll probably just write this stupid article and then wait to be arrested for thought crimes.
In the meantime I’m going to take some bomb selfies and simply buy a prepaid cell phone and throw it into the trash after completing my next Costco sized bulk purchase of Mexican Black Tar heroin.
3/3/15