Sep 24
Posted: under Digital Migration, New Media Strategery, Wrongheaded solutions.
Tags: Apple EULA, End User Licensing Agreement, GPS, iCloud, iPad, location services, MPAA, music sharing, privacy, RIAA, rights, spyware
Every time I read through one of these EULAs, it just keeps getting worse and worse. I upgraded the iPad to iOS6, because I wanted to test it out, and I’m not ready yet to turn the Maps feature on my iPhone into a hot, steaming mess. But part of the whole upgrading regimen is, [...] [...more]
Every time I read through one of these EULAs, it just keeps getting worse and worse.
I upgraded the iPad to iOS6, because I wanted to test it out, and I’m not ready yet to turn the Maps feature on my iPhone into a hot, steaming mess. But part of the whole upgrading regimen is, as is depressingly familiar to Apple users, having to agree to a new, dense and even more piracious End User Licensing Agreement (aka those damn “I Agree” screens that 99.9% of the population never actually reads, but just clicks on to make them go away).
I can’t believe the language in these things. The privacy policy has obviously been re-worked to try to put it in words that an actual human being would use – which kinda makes things even more insidious. They make an outrageous statement about how Apple is going to spy on you, and then they offer up a carefully worded explanation that makes you kinda go, “Hm. Well, I guess I can see that … that’s not so bad…”
So here, as a service to any of you who might be interested in just what rights you irrevocably, permanently, idiotically, signed away without ever actually bothering to check, are some choice bits from the EULA that is now part of your iPhone/iPad/iPod:
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Mar 15
Posted: under Amusing Nonsense, Unconventional Research.
Tags: charts, college, data mining, Facebook, graphs, IQ, mash-ups, music, privacy, SAT Score
We all make judgments about each other based on surface impressions - it's what the book "Blink" was about. A couple of bearded guys in an aging VW Microbus is such a cliche that I'll bet you immediately thought "hippie." The cops do things like this with bumper stickers, such as when they revealed that 90% of the time they pull over a car in LA with a KROQ bumper sticker, they routinely search it for drugs (when this was reported, two things happened - KROQ screamed bloody murder and thousands of stoners went outside with razor blades and started scraping furiously). Gang members do it with shoelaces, and screeners at airports do it with twitchy body language. [...more]
I find data mash-ups like this absolutely fascinating. Totally anecdotal, useless for anything other than starting an argument or feeling smug/outraged, but impossible to look away from. It was made by comparing the reported list of favorite bands from Facebook with the average SAT scores of the university that those students were attending.
So yeah, it’s a completely made-up signifier, one that purports to reveal some hidden correlations, but which is maddeningly vague. I mean, are Billy Joel fans really smarter than Foo Fighters fans? Or is it just some combination of Jersey-boy favoritism and Ivy League colleges skewing things?And AC/DC fans smarter than Doors fans? I mean, who really believes that the shop class dirtheads out-IQ the pretentious poets?
A larger point to ponder is the amount of data we all have voluntarily contributed to public places, and the ways that data is available to even casual researchers to aggregate, thin-slice and draw conclusions from. Imagine someone with a slightly more robust databank figuring out how to correlate the playlists on Last.fm and Pandora with the incidence of buying Crocs sandals and voting Democratic in local school board elections.
We all make judgments about each other based on surface impressions – it’s what the book “Blink” was about. A couple of bearded guys in an aging VW Microbus is such a cliche that I’ll bet you immediately thought “hippie.” The cops do things like this with bumper stickers, such as when they revealed that 90% of the time they pull over a car in LA with a KROQ bumper sticker, they routinely search it for drugs (when this was reported, two things happened – KROQ screamed bloody murder and thousands of stoners went outside with razor blades and started scraping furiously). Gang members do it with shoelaces, and screeners at airports do it with twitchy body language.
Graph showing the relationship between favorite band and SAT score.
