Not Quite a Blog

My first blog post as part of my new job just went up.

In case you missed it, I'm the new senior staff technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. In addition to research and tech. translation, we also aim to put out some regular blog posts on interesting issues... this time about the privacy features of Apple's new mobile operating system, iOS 6:

https://www.cdt.org/blogs/0110apple-ios-6-and-privacy-0

Apple iOS 6 and Privacy

When iOS 6 was released last week, the "big news" was Apple's decision to drop Google Maps. In the uproar that followed, iOS 6's privacy features received little fanfare, despite receiving a major overhaul. Many changes CDT has advocated for?including giving users more control over tracking and increasing the visibility of and options in the privacy settings?have been adopted in the new version.

In Settings, Apple has created a new Privacy tab (see the images below). It contains the familiar Location Services tab, allowing users to determine which apps have access to the device?s location. The Privacy tab also lists a number of other types of data that will now require explicit requests to the user for data sharing, including Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Photos, and Bluetooth. (Android, by contrast, lists all information and services that an app can access during installation, although they can't be changed later without a manual app update and a permissions notice to the user.)

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