If ubiquitous technology means the end of personal privacy, it needs to be a two-way street

ANY SEMBLANCE of privacy or security you had online just evaporated in the last week.

In the world of technology, you don’t get names much bigger than Apple and Sony. In recent days both companies have been shown to be cavalier at best, and possibly downright reckless, with their customers’ personal and financial information.

At first glance, the two incidents are quite different. Apple was found to be capturing and storing data about iPhone and iPad users’ location. It had updated its end-user licence agreement to allow for such tracking but Apple knows no one reads those densely written legal documents before blithely clicking “I Agree”, and in any case, refusal to do so renders the device inoperable. It was left to a couple of British researchers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, to disclose that this data was being stored in an unsecured file on your device and any PCs you synch it with.

If that was a classic case of privacy disappearing in the digital age, the news that Sony’s Playstation Network had been breached was a much more traditional security breach – albeit on a massive scale. As is usual in these cases, Sony released few details of the security breach and told customers it was working with unnamed external security experts, relevant police forces and data protection agencies.

But the admission that personal and financial details of 77 million subscribers may have been compromised came almost a week after Sony first shut down the service. The Japanese company justified this delay by saying it had been working with “outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident”.

For future reference, Sony, I do not charge tens of thousands of euro a day in consultancy fees but I could have told you that, if your systems are compromised by hackers, they are heading straight for your subcribers’ personal and financial data. Can someone show me a security breach in recent years where this didn’t happen? Apple’s response has also been less than inspiring.

“The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested,” the company’s statement read. Only a solicitor could appreciate the difference between recording your location and recording data that allows your location to be “rapidly and accurately” calculated.

Apple’s rather grudging explanation of why it was collecting this information demonstrates why the very companies eroding our privacy – a group in which I would also include Facebook and Google – are learning nothing from each other’s mistakes.

Apple revealed it was secretly building a “crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data”. In other words, data was being collected to create a massive global map of hotspots and mobile phone masts which will enable users of Apple devices to be located much more quickly than by using GPS. Apple clearly plans to create a plethora of new services using this massive database; it admits that a traffic information service is something it hopes to offer in coming years.

Apple didn’t need to look far to learn that such activities are fraught with risk. Google’s mass collection of location data for its Maps product got it into hot water when it was revealed its camera cars were also grabbing data from Wi-Fi hotspots.

Although technology firms are not explicit about it, there is clearly a trade-off between personal privacy and social services that works well simply because so many of us are willing to share our information.

David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect details Mark Zuckerberg’s attitude to the end of privacy. Put bluntly, Zuckerberg believes privacy is dead and the world will be a better place if all our personal details are in the public domain. Zuckerberg may have thought through the implications of social networking to their extreme but such post-privacy views are not unusual in Silicon Valley.

Where Facebook differs from the Apple/Sony old guard is that it has reacted quickly to its users’ privacy concerns, even if it constantly prods them to reveal more in an effort to enhance the usefulness of the network.

If ubiquitous technology means the end of personal privacy, it needs to be a two-way street. Companies such as Sony and Apple need to realise it is no longer acceptable to sit on their hands for a week before coming clean. Consumers have placed huge trust in these companies. Such a leap of faith needs to be reciprocated.