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I wonder if they're also removing the apps used to control women's lives in Saudi Arabia.
Of course they should remove them too.
FTA: "The controversy follows comments last week by chief executive Tim Cook, who said that Apple wanted to see customers spend less time on their devices." Talk is cheap and sells well...
You are mistaking them for Facebook or any of the other engagement-driven, ad-selling companies.
Isn't a child's phone a managed device? Using MDM for parental control seems entirely appropriate.
Isn't a child's phone a managed device? Using MDM for parental control seems entirely appropriate.
I wonder if they're also removing the apps used to control women's lives in Saudi Arabia.
While the apps are atrocious. The apps from what I csn tell are just front ends for websites and services being offered. They don’t do anything on the phone itself that takes advantage of special permissions. Of course they should remove them too.
> “Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM.
> “MDM gives a third-party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information, including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history.”
They make this sound like MDM is some scary third-party attack on their platform, neglecting to point out MDM is a system they designed. There's always been some schizophrenia from Apple around MDM (publicize new control features to admins in one release, add a big scary vague user-facing warning when that feature is actually used in the next release), but their general stance has consistently been that you, as a company, have a right to enforce whatever restrictions are available on devices used by your employees so long as you own them, and so long as you accept whatever user-disclosure features they decide to implement. Likewise, you have a right to enforce a more limited suite of controls on your employee's personal devices, so long as it's all opt-in.
I would presume any parent intending to enforce restrictions on a child's device also purchased that device. So Apple's stance here is really that parents should have less control over their children's devices than employers have over those of their employees? Or are they really talking about some exploit of the MDM framework? Because the way it's phrased here clearly seems to be framing MDM in general as a nefarious tool.
I find the decision of the scorned developers to file with the European Union’s competition office amusing considering the Union's incredibly strong stance on individual data privacy. iPhones contain so much personal data on-device that Apple is absolutely responsible for protecting that data from illegitimate access. Using MDM which is clearly intended for enterprise management is an illegitimate use-case. Period. T…
Edit: Is Apple offering similar applications? if yes are they using private APIs to implement the features?
Isn't a child's phone a managed device? Using MDM for parental control seems entirely appropriate.
So by using it, you're giving some complete strangers access to snoop on everything in your child's phone. Even if you trust the developer not to abuse that, you're trusting them to keep their own systems secure and to not hire an employee who might abuse it. We know how that worked out for the NSA where they had people using their surveillance programs to snoop on exes.
If you want to use MDM to manage your child's phone, the way to do that is with a service where you manage the MDM yourself like a company would do with their fleet of phones, not to hand the keys off to an untrusted third party.
I find the decision of the scorned developers to file with the European Union’s competition office amusing considering the Union's incredibly strong stance on individual data privacy. iPhones contain so much personal data on-device that Apple is absolutely responsible for protecting that data from illegitimate access. Using MDM which is clearly intended for enterprise management is an illegitimate use-case. Period. T…
Hopefully the parents either switch to Android if such a thing is still possible on Android or just get them flip phones with no data plan intended only for emergency calls. Where they can get a list of sent/received calls at the end of the month from the cellphone company at least, I assume.