Senate testimony yesterday could not be more emphatic
Here’s the only thing that’s clear the day after a parade of witnesses testified before a United States Senate panel about privacy issues raised by location tracking capabilities in smart phones: Apple and Google haven’t left themselves much if any wiggle room.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Closing the Barn Door, along with his fellow senators and a gaggle of reporters heard from Apple’s software chief, Guy “Bud” Tribble, and Google’s director of public policies, Alan Davidson, among others.
Said Tribble: “Apple does not track users’ locations. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”
Said Davidson: “All location data that is sent back to Google’s location servers is anonymized and is not traceable to a specific user or device.”
Now the closest I’ve ever gotten to law school is watching The Paper Chase, but it would seem to me that Tribble and Davidson are either telling the truth or begging for a Barry Bonds-style perjury rap.
I do understand that there is another, less cut-and-dried possibility: They are obfuscating; in other words, they are polishing an inconvenient truth that falls somewhere short of tracking individual users’ locations but will still leave privacy advocates and lawmakers in a lather.
This won’t be the last time they are called to Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, Richard (Stalin’s Dream) Stallman must be enjoying the theater.
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