Privacy Regulators, MIA?

The Google Now Panopticon is nothing if not omniscient and omnipresent. But what makes it so insidious is its invisibility to users and regulators alike. Google controls the collection, analysis, sharing and sale of your most personal data. The same insidious tactics are also used by Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, and a slew of others.

The standard M.O. is to “nudge” users to relinquish their data rights in order for them to have access to what have become essential public services. Judge Brown’s jurisprudence aside, such tactics flout the stated constitutional and personal data privacy policies of the United States Government, as set forth in The White House Privacy Bill of Rights (www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ privacy-final.pdf‎); The Department of Commerce Green Paper (http://www.commerce.gov/node/12471); and the Federal Trade Commission Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/03/ privacyframework.shtm). All of these policy statements declare that individuals should have access to their personal data and the right to control them. The European Union is currently in the process of adopting even more stringent privacy policy initiatives, with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 9 (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm).

These privacy initiatives are rendered moot, however, by the technical architecture of the Moto X. Historically, application developers have been able to access data sources through operating systems, whether they be Android or Apple iOS. But Google – shrewdly recognizing that market dominance can be achieved by controlling the flows of personal data – has covertly restricted access to data flows by embedding proprietary controls in the very design of its chips. The data-flows on the Moto X are not accessible through the operating system, as earlier generations of mobile phone data have been. They are, instead, controlled by Qualcomm’s Snap Dragon processor, the Motorola X8 chip and sensors such as PrimeSense 3D.

It is by deliberate design that Google and its partners have made the capture and control of personal data invisible to users and beyond their control In effect, the technology has been designed to restrict our access to our own data, and thus to render the public and regulators impotent. ''

https://idcubed.org/home_page_feature/the-spy-phone-vs-my-phone-moto-x-and-google-now/

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