Apple and others are trying to catch up with those who have been abusing our trust to make money from our data. In both cases, recent advances in privacy protection have followed years of neglect. Privacy protection is mainly aimed at two areas: online extraction when we’re accessing Google’s services and social media like Facebook, and the apps which we run on our Macs and devices.
Now I do the same using their iOS app, well away from any risk of catching Covid-19, but trusting everything on that iPhone to respect the privacy of that transaction. Gone are the days when I used to drop into my local bank and ask one of the staff – most of whom knew me – to transfer some money from one account to another. In a world where physical banks are vanishing, and writing cheques strongly discouraged, we have no option. I think this is genuine, and that anyone who uses their computer(s) and devices to store sensitive information has to take privacy seriously. So why have we become so concerned about protecting our privacy? Is this just a marketing feature, or a spurious alarm raised by those selling digital snake-oil? Without a single dialog or prompt about accessing protected files. A few minutes of Spotlight search, courtesy of HoudahSpot, and I was able to quote chapter, verse and year to answer a question from a former colleague.
Only last night I needed to huck out some information from old files, going right back to the early 1990s. That made me consider why privacy is now more important than access. I looked back a little last week, in a throwaway line: fifteen years ago, in 2006, when Spotlight arrived on our Macs “we were all more concerned with finding our documents than preventing others from reading their contents”. Looking back may not seem an Apple thing, but it’s a great advantage to be a Janus.
Clamxav com mac#
I’m no interior designer, and have a lifelong hatred for open-plan offices anyway, but there’s one feature that I’m sure Apple’s headquarters still needs: at each level, at least one working Mac from each five year period since 1984.
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