March 2020

This NBC news story reads like a thriller: Why were the police asking about this man's whereabouts? "I was hit with a really deep fear," the man says. Alert readers have solved the mystery immediately: "exercise app." This hapless soul trusts Silicon Valley [SV] enough to have a phone and load it up with typical, privacy-invading apps and then wonders why he got caught in a police cyber-dragnet -- in this case, a flurry of inquiries to SV about anyone with an app who had been tracked in the vicinity of a burgled home. The article assumes readers have the ability to be shocked when most of them are similarly equipped and don't care as long as they aren't the ones in the crosshairs. Perhaps the writer wants to spur (a) less chumminess between SV and law enforcement (ha!), (b) legislation to stop this kind of cooperation (ha! ha!), or (c) consumer abandonment of smartphones, GPS, and apps (ha! ha! ha!). In the future expect articles like this to read: "When SV contacted Joseph Blow requesting information about his whereabouts on March 2, he was filled with a sudden rush of pleasure to be a citizen helping the authorities to catch bad guys."