test.ical.ly | getting the web by the balls

Feb/12

24

How the store metaphor goes astray – Apple, Google, Amazon and others agree on app privacy

2 Comments · Posted by Christian in Economics

This week in California Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, RIM and HP agreed to ensure privacy for apps sold in their stores.

Ensuring privacy is certainly a good thing but in this case it makes me wonder about the accuracy of the store metaphor.

These companies agreed on ensuring privacy by ensuring that apps available from their stores (or markets) always notify the users about any access to their informations like Facebook already does with FB apps.

Note that we are talking about apps that are sold by these companies but not developed by them.

It is clever to install privacy ensurance at that point as the stores and markets are the only place in which you can control the whole inventory that is on offer.

In the real world however we have similar requirements and even laws that protect privacy and security and health and so on. Only they apply to the producers of the products in question. Not the stores.

Just try to imagine a store owner being made responsible for the goods he sells that are produced by others.

In the parallel world of our digital lives the responsibilities shifted to the store owners. From a technological point of view this makes sense and on the surface even from a customers perspective.

But this shift also explains why Apple and Facebook reject anything that includes i.e. sexual imagery.

Globally acting companies that have to comply with the laws of every country they run a business in are made responsible for the goods we all consume. This finally leads to a maximum level of restriction and eventually limits each and everyone of us in our consumption.

All the more reason for meta markets to emerge!

Mozilla seems to think that way too.

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  • Pingback: How the store metaphor goes astray | Mobile | Syngu

  • Nicolas

    Not sure to agree with your comparison between sex and privacy.

    The ask first politic can be anoying but allow users to choose. How this can be bad for users? You want to use their information without their agreement?

    We all know that many business try to get everything they can about you and try to use/abuse it all the way they can… I do not agree with that position.

    This is subtil… But it is okay that twitter use my tweets. We all know explicitely that tweets are public. On the other end, part of facebook content is implicitely private: restricted to yourself, your friend, and maybe even friends of friends. Yet facebook keep the behavior of doing whatever they want about your data. This is not good.

    For the sexuality, we don’t have the choice.

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