[guest post by Dana]

Apple announced that they would be rolling out a child safety initiative to flag child sex abuse images on iCloud accounts:

Apple announced its intention to unroll a new update that would allow the company to detect for images of child sexual abuse stored in iCloud Photos. This announcement came paired with two new features designed to similarly protect against child abuse.

Along with the iCloud feature, the company plans to launch a new tool within the Messages app that would warn children and their parents about the receiving or sending of sexually explicit photos. Additionally, Apple announced its intention to expand guidance in Siri and Search to protect children from “unsafe situations.”

News of these updates was first reported in the Financial Times where the paper wrote that the detection feature would “continuously scan photos that are stored on a U.S. user’s iPhone” with harmful material being alerted to law enforcement.

Note:

The technology involved in this plan is fundamentally new. While Facebook and Google have long scanned the photos that people share on their platforms, their systems do not process files on your own computer or phone. Because Apple’s new tools do have the power to process files stored on your phone, they pose a novel threat to privacy.

Apple addressed the privacy issue, to some degree:

Apple said…that its detection system is designed with “user privacy in mind.” Instead of scanning images on the Cloud, it said the “system performs on-device matching using a database” of known child abuse images compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Apple wrote it transforms that database material into unreadable “hashes” that are stored on the users’ device.

“Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the known [child sexual abuse] hashes,” the company wrote. “This matching process is powered by a cryptographic technology called private set intersection, which determines if there is a match without revealing the result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted data about the image.”

It sounds like an absolutely worthy endeavor. After all, we want to keep children safe from being sexually exploited as well as see those who partake in such heinous behaviors against children held accountable. And yet, there are concerns…

Consider that most parents (and grandparents) have taken photos of their chubby, dimply babies and grandbabies in various states of undress, including playing in the bathtub or wading pools, toddlers romping in backyard sprinklers sans clothing, etc. While completely innocent, what happens if those images are mistakenly flagged? Because if the image is flagged, it will then be reviewed by employees. Some anonymous individuals will be making decisions about whether or not to file a report on you which could trigger a notification to law enforcement. Apple addressed these concerns. Whether satisfactorily, is up to the individual:

In conjunction with this, Apple said it uses another piece technology that ensures the safety vouchers cannot be interpreted by the company unless the voucher is flagged as a child sexual abuse image, whereupon the company will “manually review” the reported content. If deemed abusive [by an employee], the company may disable the individual’s account and will send a report to NCMEC which can then contact law enforcement. The company reported this technology has a “one in one trillion chance per year” of incorrectly flagging an image.

Understanding that the intent of the “manual review” is to help prevent mistakes, I’m wondering what sort of expertise that individual will have to make said decisions? And what if, in real-life situations, the odds of incorrectly flagging an image end up being less than the nearly impossible claimed, and innocent people are mistakenly targeted? One has to wonder just how much testing took place to be able to make the “one in a one trillion” claim. Was it enough:

Another worry is that the new technology has not been sufficiently tested. The tool relies on a new algorithm designed to recognize known child sexual abuse images, even if they have been slightly altered. Apple says this algorithm is extremely unlikely to accidentally flag legitimate content, and it has added some safeguards, including having Apple employees review images before forwarding them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. But Apple has allowed few if any independent computer scientists to test its algorithm.

Moreover, although concerns about the iMessage feature are brushed off here, I’m not sure they should be, despite reassurances:

In the case of the iMessage child safety service, the privacy intrusion is not especially grave. At no time is Apple or law enforcement informed of a nude image sent or received by a child (again, only the parents of children under 13 are informed), and children are given the ability to pull back from a potentially serious mistake without informing their parents.

We aren’t told what happens if the child ignores the warning and views the image anyway, and it ends up corresponding with material on the registry for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Wouldn’t the image then be flagged and a duty to notify both parents and trigger steps to notify law enforcement kick in? If so, what would the parents then be facing? And considering the immaturity and lack of self-control of children under 13, I’m not convinced that, depending on the specific age, they would be able to grasp the huge risk in viewing such an image and be willing and/or capable of pulling back.

Anyway, here are more issues of concern:

While Apple has vowed to use this technology to search only for child sexual abuse material, and only if your photos are uploaded to iCloud Photos, nothing in principle prevents this sort of technology from being used for other purposes and without your consent. It is reasonable to wonder if law enforcement in the United States could compel Apple (or any other company that develops such capacities) to use this technology to detect other kinds of images or documents stored on people’s computers or phones.

While Apple is introducing the child sexual abuse detection feature only in the United States for now, it is not hard to imagine that foreign governments will be eager to use this sort of tool to monitor other aspects of their citizens’ lives — and might pressure Apple to comply. Apple does not have a good record of resisting such pressure in China, for example, having moved Chinese citizens’ data to Chinese government servers. Even some democracies criminalize broad categories of hate speech and blasphemy. Would Apple be able to resist the demands of legitimately elected governments to use this technology to help enforce those laws?

I have to admit that it feels uncomfortable – and almost wrong – to raise questions about a proposed program intended to help protect children from abhorrent evil, and yet here we are. (I just can’t help but picture some loving grandparents with images of happy, unclothed grandbabies being that “one in a trillion” mistakenly being caught up in a devastating legal nightmare…)

Thoughts?

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

I’ve written about the conflict of health care professionals condemning protesters rallying against the lockdown (and to re-open the economy) and health care professionals sanctioning protests after the murder of George Floyd. In the latter, they often cited, not the science, but rather the greater good involved. Here’s a look at these health care workers “grapple” with trying to reconcile their conflicting views:

As the pandemic took hold, most epidemiologists have had clear proscriptions in fighting it: No students in classrooms, no in-person religious services, no visits to sick relatives in hospitals, no large public gatherings.

So when conservative anti-lockdown protesters gathered on state capitol steps in places like Columbus, Ohio and Lansing, Michigan, in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and forecast surging infections. When Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia relaxed restrictions on businesses in late April as testing lagged and infections rose, the talk in public health circles was of that state’s embrace of human sacrifice.

…

And then the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything.

Soon the streets nationwide were full of tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with demonstrations and the toppling of statues. And rather than decrying mass gatherings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests.

That caused the public to ask: Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question? For me, it’s an uphill climb to believe that the advice of any number of health care professionals wasn’t contingent upon a subjective view of the protests in question.

Journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams pinpoints the why:

The way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science. What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging?

But lets hear about the struggle for reconciling this whiplash-messaging from the professionals themselves:

Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, studies COVID-19. When, wearing a mask and standing at the edge of a great swell of people, she attended a recent protest in Houston supporting Floyd, a sense of contradiction tugged at her.

“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” she said. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”

Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, described a similar struggle.

“Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” Lurie said. “But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.

“I am still grappling with that.”

To which Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, added: “Do I worry that mass protests will fuel more cases? Yes, I do. But a dam broke and there’s no stopping that.”

And about the letter that 1,300 epidemiologists and health care workers signed:

Some public health scientists publicly waved off the conflicted feelings of their colleagues, saying the country now confronts a stark moral choice. The letter signed by more than 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers urged Americans to adopt a “consciously anti-racist” stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators and the protesters in moral, ideological and racial terms.

Those who protested stay-at-home orders were “rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives” the letter stated.

By contrast, it said, those protesting systemic racism “must be supported.”

“As public health advocates,” they stated, “we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health.”

Note: “There is as of yet no firm evidence that protests against police violence led to noticeable spikes in infection rates. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no overall rise in infections, but could not rule out that infections might have risen in the age demographic of the protesters. Health officials in Houston and Los Angeles have suggested the demonstrations there led to increased infections, but they have not provided data. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has instructed contact tracers not to ask if infected people attended protests.”

And yet health care professionals are willing to cast a vote for the “moral imperative,” no matter who it might impact, because it is seen as the greater good:

Mary Travis Bassett, who is African American, served as the New York City health commissioner and now directs the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She noted that even before COVID-19, Black Americans were sicker and died more than two years earlier, on average, than white Americans.

And she noted, police violence has long cast a deep shadow over African Americans. From the auction block to plantations to centuries of lynchings carried out with the complicity of local law enforcement, blacks have suffered the devastating effects of state power.

She acknowledged that the current protests are freighted with moral complications, not least the possibility that a young person marching for justice might come home and inadvertently infect a mother, aunt or grandparent.

“If there’s an elder in the household, that person should be cocooned to the best extent that we can,” Bassett said.

But she said the opportunity to achieve a breakthrough transcends such worries about the virus.

“Racism has been killing people a lot longer than COVID-19,” she said. “The willingness to say we all bear the burden of that is deeply moving to me.”

Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale University, observes that there are actually two moral imperatives involved for health care professionals: To comfort the afflicted and to speak truth about risks to public health, no matter how unpleasant.

To that end he says that those two values are now in conflict:

To take to the street to protest injustice is to risk casting open doors and letting the virus endanger tens of thousands, he said. There is a danger, he said, in asserting that one moral imperative overshadows another.

“The left and the right want to wish the virus away,” Christakis said. “We can’t wish away…inconvenient scientific truths.”

He said that framing the anti-lockdown protests as white supremacist and dangerous and the George Floyd protests as anti-racist and essential obscures a messier reality.

When he was a hospice doctor in Chicago and Boston, he said, he saw up close how isolation deepened the despair of the dying — a fate now suffered by many in the pandemic, with hospital visits severely restricted. For epidemiologists to turn around and argue for loosening the ground rules for the George Floyd marches risks sounding hypocritical.

“We allowed thousands of people to die alone,” he said. “We buried people by Zoom. Now all of a sudden we are saying, never mind?”

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

Last May, Denise Young Smith was named vice president of diversity and inclusion at Apple. She has been described as Silicon Valley’s most powerful black woman. At the end of this year, however, Young Smith will be leaving Apple, a company that prides itself on a focus to hire more women and minorities. She will be replaced by Christie Smith, who is white. Young Smith’s decision to leave the company appears to have made prior to making what some see as controversial comments she made about diversity. Others, however, see them as not only reasonable comments about diversity, but ones that speak to a broad inclusiveness in the workplace.

During a talk at last month’s One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Young Smith addressed a consistently rebuffed component in the house of diversity:

“I focus on everyone,” Ms. Smith, who has 20 years of experience in the company, said during the Oct. 4-7 conference. “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color or the women or the LGBT or whatever because that means they’re carrying that around … because that means that we are carrying that around on our foreheads. […] There can be 12 white blue-eyed blond men in a room and they are going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”

The issue, Young Smith explains, “is representation and mix.” She is keen to work to bring all voices into the room that “can contribute to the outcome of any situation.”

Young Smith later apologized for her remarks, emailing staff saying that her remarks “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it. For that, I’m sorry. More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed.”

One wonders if that was enough to satisfy attorney Kiara Imani Williams, who took Young Smith to task for her “public display of ignorance,” or perhaps more accurately, her inclusive thinking. Apparently, Williams believes that, by default, being a white male prevents one from participating in any real kind of collaborative process, awareness or inclusion. Other than their blue eyes, they’ve really got nothing much to offer:

Mrs. Smith’s comment displays a very superficial and quite frankly, problematic, view of diversity. It’s a no-brainer that every living human being has a different perspective, viewpoint, and set of life experiences. In fact, nature vs. nurture studies have proven that even identical twins often have different frameworks for relating to the world around them. But workplace diversity is not about the “diversity of fingerprints”, it’s about representation, awareness, collaboration and inclusion.

Williams even takes Apple to task for its creations, including emojis:

Apple’s “diverse representation” game is laughable. Let’s start with emojis. Apple’s emoji game is not, and has never been, on fleek. A few years ago, Apple finally responded to complaints about all white emojis. Instead of creating actual emojis of color, Apple simply allows its users to make white emojis into a different color. Darkening the skin color of a white emoji doesn’t make the emoji black. I don’t know many black people who were born with silky straight black hair… but what do I know, maybe white men with blue eyes are better equipped to speak on black hair.

Those offended by Young Smith’s remarks because they believed her to be defending white men in a workplace already saturated by their presence, including at Apple, only further confirms that which many of us already believe: diversity of thought is not welcome in today’s construct of inclusion. Unless those white men are gay like Apple CEO Tim Cook, then all bets are off. What constitutes diversity and inclusion is determined by a preset narrow-minded bias that, no matter how unique an individual might be, and no matter how different their world view is, if they are the wrong gender or skin color, they’re not welcome at the table.

Anyway, as Tech Crunch notes:

At the leadership level, Apple is still predominantly run by men, who make up 71 percent of the leaders at the company worldwide. White people, meanwhile make up 66 percent of the leaders at Apple in the U.S. Meanwhile, only 3 percent of Apple’s leaders in the U.S. are are black, so Young Smith’s departure won’t do anything to help the amount of black representation at the top.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

These silly protestor types crack me up.

Fiona Apple is gearing up for Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington with a new song, titled “Tiny Hands.”

The singer-songwriter teamed up with composer Michael Whalen to create the minute-long track, which Apple recorded on her phone and released Tuesday. The song, which references Donald Trump, is meant to serve as a chant for protesters speaking out against the President-elect, whose inauguration takes place Friday in Washington, D.C.

Sampling Trump’s own words from the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump made vulgar comments about women, Apple sings, “We don’t want your tiny hands, anywhere near our underpants.”

Here’s the song. It’s . . . not good. Pretty much what you would expect, though.

Hahahahaha.

I don’t care for Donald Trump or the leftists who are protesting him, so watching the two sides get upset at one another is pretty much a joyous event. (When the protestors threaten performers or plan to set off stink bombs, my distaste for Trump gets put aside and I take sides against the protestors, as all Americans should.) I find Fiona Apple’s song silly — except that I know how much it will upset Trump (given how insecure he is, especially about his tiny, tiny hands) and that’s sillier still. So I have to laugh.

There is a serious point to be made, though: as long as this sort of “art” (if you want to call it that) poking fun at our leaders is possible, without retribution from the government, we’re going to be OK.

I recently re-watched the movie “V for Vendetta.” (Minor spoiler alert if you have not seen it and want to.) It’s a story about fighting fascism and governmental evil. It’s based on a graphic novel written about Thatcherite Britain (which shows you how utterly overdramatic the left can be) but its storyline — about a government that creates its own terror attacks and finds a group to scapegoat for them, as part of its program of seizing absolute totalitarian power — arguably applies to Vladimir Putin’s regime.

In one memorable scene, a popular television personality decides to throw the government-approved script out the window and write an episode that brutally mocks the dictator. He thinks that he’ll get a slap on the wrist, but instead he is dragged away by thugs, never to be seen again.

Putin’s regime would likely not tolerate this sort of satire against the Great Leader without some revenge.

But making fun of the “leader” is still allowed in this country. That’s a good thing, and we should appreciate it and fight for it — because it doesn’t have to be that way.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

The New York Times Sunday headline reads: “How Hillary Clinton Grappled With Bill Clinton’s Infidelity, and His Accusers.” But if you read the article, it turns out that “grappling” with this uncomfortable topic meant “trying to destroy the accusers.”

Confronting a spouse’s unfaithfulness is painful under any circumstance. For Mrs. Clinton, it happened repeatedly and in the most public of ways, unfolding at the dawn of the 24/7 news cycle, and later in impeachment proceedings that convulsed the nation.

Outwardly, she remained stoic and defiant, defending her husband while a progression of women and well-funded conservative operatives accused Mr. Clinton of behavior unbecoming the leader of the free world.

But privately, she embraced the Clinton campaign’s aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting — tactics that women’s rights advocates frequently denounce.

The campaign hired a private investigator with a bare-knuckles reputation who embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”

A campaign aide said that Hillary Clinton participated in the decision to hire Jack Palladino, “a private investigator known for tactics such as making surreptitious recordings and deploying attractive women to extract information”:

An aide to the campaign, who declined to be publicly identified because the aide had not been authorized to speak for the Clintons, said Mrs. Clinton was among those who had discussed and approved the hiring, which shifted the campaign to a more aggressive posture.

. . . .

“Every acquaintance, employer, and past lover should be located and interviewed,” Mr. Palladino wrote. “She is now a shining icon — telling lies that so far have proved all benefit and no cost — for any other opportunist who may be considering making Clinton a target.”

Challenge Bill and this is what will happen to you. Nasty stuff, and Hillary was fully on board. And it wasn’t just Gennifer Flowers whom she helped to attack:

[T]heir first taste of trouble came in a Penthouse magazine story by a rock groupie named Connie Hamzy, who claimed Mr. Clinton had once propositioned her at a hotel in Little Rock, Ark.

Mr. Clinton brushed off the story, saying that Ms. Hamzy had made a sexual advance toward him, George Stephanopoulos, the communications director of the 1992 campaign, recalled in his book, “All Too Human.”

But Mrs. Clinton demanded action.

“We have to destroy her story,” she said, according to Mr. Stephanopoulos.

There’s much more they could have delved into. If Donald Trump’s tax returns from 1995 are news in 2016 — and they are — then certainly Hillary Clinton’s treatment of her husband’s accusers in the late 90s is relevant too.

[Cross posted at RedState.]

There is a lot of misinformation flying around about the order issued to Apple with respect to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. If you’re interested in doing a bit of in depth reading, I recommend reading the motion filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. For a shorter read, check out Orin Kerr.

Let me make some brief points.

First, the government is not asking Apple to break the phone’s encryption. They are seeking to have Apple turn off an auto-erase function, which (when turned on) automatically erases all the data on an iPhone if there are ten consecutive incorrect attempts to enter the four-digit passcode. They are seeking to have Apple allow the passcodes to be entered electronically — so nobody has to manually type in every possible four-digit combination. And they are seeking to have Apple disable a feature that introduces delays of increasing length as incorrect guesses at the passcode are made.

Second, this specific case does not implicate anyone’s right to privacy. The phone in question was a work phone issued to Syed Farook with the explicit understanding that he had no privacy in its contents. Moreover, Farook’s employer, which owns the phone, has consented to the search. Even if it were his private phone, a magistrate has issued a warrant based on probable cause. You can claim that this leads to a slippery slope, but government already has the ability to get warrants to look at phones, phone records, search your house, and so forth. Unless you are so paranoid that you want to disable the ability of law enforcement to do its everyday job — and increasingly many people seemingly are — then this is no big deal.

Third, as described by the government, the software in question would have a unique identifier so that it would only work with this single device.

I see people on Twitter and elsewhere claiming that this is an intrusion on Apple’s rights because it is the government forcing Apple to work for it, and to create a product that does not exist. This seems like a good argument until you think about it for a second. When law enforcement has a phone company set up a pen register or trap and trace, people at the phone company have to expend labor to comply. When law enforcement obtains a search warrant for cell phone records, a custodian of records has to work to comply.

When a Congressional committee, or a party seeking documents through FOIA, seeks Hillary’s emails, people have to work to comply. Are we saying they shouldn’t have to?

But, it is argued, Apple should not have to create a new software program for the government. I await Apple’s argument on this, as does Kerr — but such an argument seems unlikely to succeed. The features the government seeks to disable — such as the auto-erase, and the delays caused when bad passcode guesses are made — are features Apple put into their code. Creating software that turns those features off does not sound particularly hard for a company that created software to enable those features.

If the State Department said it had to write a program to efficiently search for Hillary’s emails, I think we would all say: OK, write the program . . . and hurry up about it!

To make the criminal justice system work, we compel the attendance of jurors, sometimes for weeks, at a pittance. We compel the attendance of witnesses, sometimes in situations where they are putting themselves in danger by testifying. And, as noted, companies complying with subpoenas and search warrants must expend labor as well.

And we all work for the government already, for weeks or months at a time — through the magic of the income tax!

Why, the government even has the power to send you off to war. To take your body and put it to its use, for years at a time, risking your life.

We’re really going to get that upset, then, about a coder being told to turn off features that he enabled in software? When we balance that against the chance to learn information about who else might have been involved in a plot to kill Americans?

This doesn’t seem like that close a call to me — now that I understand it. I encourage you to read the links above and become informed, so you understand it too.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply.

Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself.

And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny.

——————–

And for this week’s Friday Frivolity, sing along with me…

I left my iPhone…  in San Francisco…

Yes, that’s right, once again Apple was getting ready to introduce the most awesomest phone ever and once again someone accidentally left it in a restaurant:

In a bizarre repeat of a high-profile incident last year, an Apple employee once again appears to have lost an unreleased iPhone in a bar, CNET has learned.

The errant iPhone, which went missing in San Francisco’s Mission district in late July, sparked a scramble by Apple security to recover the device over the next few days, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

Last year, an iPhone 4 prototype was bought by a gadget blog that paid $5,000 in cash. This year’s lost phone seems to have taken a more mundane path: it was taken from a Mexican restaurant and bar and may have been sold on Craigslist for $200. Still unclear are details about the device, what version of the iOS operating system it was running, and what it looks like.

Yeah, yeah, right Apple.  I am willing to buy that the first time was just a screw up, but twice?  Smells like a publicity stunt to me.

Of course if it is, it might be going hilariously wrong…

This is the second time that an iPhone prototype went missing in a bar just before its release. But in April 2010 Apple was successful in getting the iPhone 4 prototype back after it had been sold by a finder.

This time Apple is having a tough time getting back its iPhone 5, which was left in a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco and then was sold on Craiglist for $200, according to reports.

Guys if you are going to intentionally drop evidence, do it near the tech reporters.  Just sayin’.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

Can we get Flash video on the iPhone now?

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

“This’ll be interesting,” Glenn Reynolds wrote this morning, linking to this story.  Here’s the rundown.  Last week I told you about how Apple was secretly tracking users movements, an appalling invasion of privacy.  So this morning, Reynolds linked to this story about the lawsuit that had been filed:

Two Apple customers have filed a lawsuit accusing the Cupertino, California, company of committing violations of computer-fraud laws by recording location data of iPhone and iPad customers.

Vikram Ajjampur, an iPhone customer in Florida, and William Devito, a New York iPad customer, filed the suit in federal court April 22 in Tampa, Florida.

“The accessibility of the unencrypted information collected by Apple places users at serious risk of privacy invasions, including stalking” (.pdf), the lawsuit states….

Ajjampur and Devito are seeking class action status to represent U.S. iPhone and iPad customers. The complaint seeks an injunction requiring Apple to disable the data collection in a software update, and it also seeks damages for violations committed.

(Emphasis added.)  Well, I will have to disagree with Mr. Reynolds.  The most likely outcome here is that these class representatives will secure benefits primary to themselves, their lawyers will make millions, and we the people will be lucky if we get that update they are talking about.  It will not be interesting, but the latest tediously predictable example of abuse in the class action system.

Consider, for example these recent class actions.  For instance, there was a controversy a few years back when someone discovered some discarded game code opening up a (terrible looking) sex game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which you could only find if you actually hacked the game.  This apparently horrified parents who were apparently okay with the usual action in the Grand Theft Auto series, which includes giving players the option of having sex with a prostitute in a car (complete with rocking car and moans), and then running over said prostitute and collecting the money you just gave her for the sex.  That resulted in a settlement giving up $35 in damages per customer if they seek it (at last reporting, none had).  Meanwhile, the class representatives were paid almost $25,000 for their trouble and the lawyers were paid $1 million.

Or take this one.  Did you know that loud noises hurt your ears?  Well, according to this suit, the ordinary reasonably prudent person doesn’t know that and thus turns up their Bluetooth to 11, because they are not properly warned.  The class got nothing, a few charities got some money, and representatives sought $12K and their lawyers sought $850K.

Seriously, follow Overlawyered for a month, and you will see many cases like this.

The point is that class actions are the dirtiest area in law.  If you want to talk about lawsuit abuse, there is the poster child.  I am not sure if they should be abolished altogether, but at the very least this is an area in serious need of reform because 1) it encourages lawsuits on the most ridiculous theories and 2) even if there is merit, the vast majority of the aggrieved get little in compensation.  Indeed, we are unlikely even to get some fun discovery on the subject, here–they will most likely settle before it comes to that.

So not interesting, but a tedious example of how broken the class action system is.  At least that is my prediction.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by DRJ]

Apple unveiled (for real this time) its iPhone 4 today. It’s slim. It’s Apple cool. It’s still AT&T.

I have one of the older versions. What do you think — should I upgrade or not?

— DRJ