[467] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] The Weird and Wacky World of iPhone Censorship
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Fri Apr 24 12:22:27 2009
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:52:39 -0700
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The Weird and Wacky World of iPhone Censorship
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000552.html
Greetings. One of the key elements that the purveyors of censorship
often want in their arsenal is secrecy. It isn't enough to ban
particular materials, it's also extremely convenient to obscure or
completely hide the mechanisms by which censorship is performed, and
to keep hidden from pubic view the lists of items that are banned.
After all, if you know in detail what's banned, you might become even
more interested in them, or try to use this knowledge to work around
the prohibitions.
Of course, such secrecy has another particularly diabolical effect as
well -- it allows for the easy banning of materials in nonsensical,
arbitrary, error-prone, or completely inappropriate ways, even when
judged under the official terms of whatever censorship regime is
currently in force.
In the Internet realm, we see all of these effects in the worlds of
content filtering, both privately operated and government mandated.
The "family jewels" of most Internet filtering systems are the secret
lists of banned sites -- for the revelation of these can easily reveal
sites that have been inappropriately blocked.
The other related element of secrecy -- obscuring the process through
which censorship decisions are made -- is often equally important to
preserving censored environments.
This latter aspect comes into direct play in the controversies over
Apple's dictatorial control over iPhone and iPod applications. The
removal from the Apple app store of an obnoxious "baby shaking" game
after protests, has brought into the spotlight the arbitrary,
secretive, contradictory, and seemingly nonsensical aspects of Apple's
application approval process
( http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/Story?id=7415443 ).
Of particular note are the implications that Apple is especially
sensitive about any applications that might offend anyone in a current
*political* context.
We're brought inevitably to the question of why Apple should be
playing application approval God for these devices in the first place,
especially in a manner where the approval or rejection process is
anything but transparent or open to scrutiny.
Contrast this with Google's attitude toward their Android OS and G1
phone, where not only can virtually any application be posted in the
Android Market immediately without prior approval, but users can
choose to install whatever apps they wish directly to their phones and
bypass the Market completely in an entirely private manner.
I know of only two applications that have been pulled from universal
access on the Android Market -- one involving PC tethering over
T-Mobile, and the other the capturing of YouTube videos -- both of
which can perhaps arguably be viewed as violating specific terms of
service related to the cellular carrier and YouTube themselves.
Notably, both of these applications continue to be available for
download directly to Android phones from non-Market sites, and while
it is supposedly theoretically possible for them to do so, Google has
not made any attempts that I am aware of to disable their use.
In essence, Apple's iPhone/iPod application ecosystem has the elements
of being designed for "children" who need to be controlled and guided
in every aspect of their interactions with the devices, while Google's
view is that users are generally adults who are best able to make
their own decisions in these regards.
Would protests cause Google to ban a "baby shaker" application from
Android Market? I don't know the answer to that, but since such an
app could be installed by any G1 owners without using the Market in
any case, the question has a wholly different significance than it
would in Apple's tightly controlled iPhone/iPod application
environment.
Apparently there are well over a hundred iPhone/iPod apps that are
oriented toward *farting* and have passed successfully through
Apple's application approval process -- yet a countdown clock to
Obama's inauguration was banned, with Steve Jobs chiming in on that
particular ban to say that he didn't see any point in "offending"
people.
The world of censorship is a Bizarro World indeed.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition
for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: LW1
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