Smartphone users try to preserve privacy in the digital age

Privacy — in the good old days, it meant you didn't have to let soldiers freeload in your own house. In 2011, it means that you take Apple to court for tracking your location without your consent via your smartphone.

Following the revelation that the iPhone was tracking users' locations, Android users discovered last week that their phones were tracking their locations as well. Android users brought a lawsuit against Google, after a group of iPhone users had done the same. A little over a week ago, iPhone users found a location-tracking application in an unencrypted file in the backup directory of the iPhone 4. The data tracked the iPhone's location using imprecise longitudes and latitudes. This discovery provoked a firestorm of debate with netizens as well as international lawsuits over privacy violations.

In an attempt to clear up the controversy, Apple released a Q&A about the location-tracking device stating that it was not, in fact, collecting users' location data, but rather crowd-sourcing Wi-Fi hotspots. The fact that the phone has been shown to collect over a year's data is a bug in the system that will be fixed in later updates, the company said.

Many iPhone owners in the NYU community seem satisfied with this explanation.
"I really don't think it matters," CAS junior Vivian Xia said. "If they are just using it to help users get better Wi-Fi, that's fine."

Meanwhile, Aneline Amalathas, who currently owns a iPhone 3, said that it is suspicious that Apple should react so drastically to complaints from irate customers.

"I think it's a little fishy that they would decide to roll out an update just because something like this was discovered," she said. "I mean, what do you need a year's data for? And isn't that a pretty big bug in the system if you really don't need that much data? I personally don't think that I'm worth paying attention to in the grand scheme of things."

Stern IT Professor Aninyda Ghose, meanwhile, said that debates about violations of privacy are irrelevant in the digital age.

"My own personal opinion is that we have near zero privacy anyway in today's world," he said. "Just be aware of this, and move on. In other words, to me, online privacy is just a seven-letter word."