Science & Tech / Web Culture

A Bad Bite of Apple

By: Chris O'Shea

As Apple fans, you'd be hard-pressed to get us to say something bad about the company. We try to be objective, but c'mon, they make the best stuff! However, as Gizmodo reports, the company recently filed for a patent that basically creates an online clone of you, and this has us kind of freaked out.

This worry about Apple comes as quite the shock to your Daily Lounge writers. For years we've stood behind Jobs and his products. Who cares if there are tons of MP3 players available that do the same thing as an iPod and for much cheaper? The iPod has white headphones! Who cares if Microsoft created the tablet computer way before Apple? Jobs and his clan made another one and it's better! In short: To us, pretty much everything Apple does is great and we need it right now. Okay, aside from Ping. You don't even know what we're talking about, do you? Exactly.

But this cloning system, this is cause for concern. The patent that Apple filed is actually, on the surface, rooted in good intentions. As everyone knows, when you're browsing online, companies are tracking your movement. They do this because they're creepy and greedy and can use the gathered info to target ads to you. But if Apple's idea comes to fruition, your clone would be the one being tracked, not you. And using Apple's service, you could view what companies are tracking from your clone, and even customize it so some things could be tracked and some couldn't.

Did you get all that? No? Well neither did we, and that's part of the problem. Sure this is just the beginnings of an idea, but if we can't even understand the technology, how are we ever going to be able to use it correctly? We can't even remember all of our stupid passwords, and Apple thinks we're going to be able to keep track of a clone of ourselves? Yeah, that's going to go well. We can see it now, we're browsing with ourselves and suddenly we switch to our clone and we have no idea how. There's an awful lot of grey area in this new world.

That leads us to the other problem with Apple's cloning system. If Apple creates it, doesn't that mean that they'll be able to track us and our clone, thus defeating the entire purpose of the operation?

But maybe that's the whole point. Maybe Apple wants to guide us in under the guise of helping with privacy because they know that if they're the only company with access to lots of browsing data, they could sell that stuff for maximum profits one day. Of course they wouldn't make the selling of our information obvious, they'd tweak it just enough so that people will accept it and love it, without questioning it. Somehow that sounds familiar.

[Pic via Flickr - Aditza121]