Gotta love government IT projects. When you want to randomly pick airline travelers for reduced security screening, it makes sense to use a random number generator to choose those people, so you can show there’s no discrimination involved.
What makes rather less sense is to pay $336k for the app. Or maybe even as much as $1.4M …
In light of the recent reporting in regards to the NSA and governments across the world and their connection to the data that technology companies hold on their customers, Apple has published a lengthy document detailing its customer privacy policies.
We believe that our customers have a right to understand how their personal information is handled, and we consider it our responsibility to provide them with the best privacy protections available. Apple has prepared this report on the requests we receive from governments seeking information about individual users or devices in the interest of transparency for our customers around the world. This report provides statistics on requests related to customer accounts as well as those related to specific devices. We have reported all the information we are legally allowed to share, and Apple will continue to advocate for greater transparency about the requests we receive.
Additionally, the company has published charts that detail how many customer data requests it has received Between the beginning of January and end of June this year from governments.
Breakdown of important details:
(via <a href="http://www.ap.org" target="_blank">AP</a>)
The U.S. Department of Justice has released its case against Apple in the alleged ‘ebooks pricing fix’ case (via CNET) that claims Apple made deals with book publishers to manipulate the price of ebooks.
The Justice Department believes Apple moved to raise ebook prices before Apple launched the iPad and the iBookstore so the company could benefit at the cost of the consumer.
Notably, everyone mentioned in the complaint has settled out of court ahead of this week’s trial, but Tim Cook has remained adamant that Apple is innocent of any wrongdoing.
Apple’s iBookstore has established deals with all of the major book publishers and sells ebooks on its proprietary store for viewing on Apple’s iOS devices including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
As we noted this morning, Tim Cook echoed this message at last week’s D11 conference:
The e-book case to me is bizarre. We’ve done nothing wrong there, and so we’re taking a very principled position. … We’re not going to sign something that says we did something we didn’t do. … So we’re going to fight.
The Justice Department released all 81 slides outlining its case against Apple, which you can view in its entirety below.
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