Senator Al Franken asks iOS developers to provide "clear and understandable privacy policies"

I never understood the outrage in the first place. BY LAW the phone company collects that information for e911 and billing purposes. Law enforcement doesn't even need a warrant any more to get that data out of storage in many cases.

Apple and Google turned the "lemons" of unfunded extra features into "shiny gold lemonade stands" but letting the USERS (and programmers) have access to all that information the phone companies where hoarding and selling privately. Apple and Google are fairly honest... what about the telcos that have been collecting that information for at least 5 years now and selling it to law enforcement, insurance companies, and marketers behind everybody's back?

Apple and Google didn't CHANGE anything... they just pointed out the Emperor had no clothes to begin with.

Forget Apple. If the good Senator wants to really protect our privacy, how about cleaning up the government first?

In particular, how about the way that the US government apparently views the terms of the Patriot Act?

"Wyden says that while there are numerous interpretations of how the Patriot Act works, the official government interpretation of the law remains classified. A significant gap has developed now between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly claims it says."

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/obama-in-europe-signs-958299.html

Do you understand the political environment in the U.S.? The work of an individual politician has no impact on big decision making as a whole. They have two options; vote with my party, or vote for what I believe and as a result be disowned by my party and likely lose my reelection. Remember when it was a bad thing to be labeled a "flip flopper"? Just search Google News. Today it's just part of the job. A politician says they feel strongly this way about something, then when they party announces their feelings on the subject (completely opposite of the other party if they already made their stance clear), and suddenly out of nowhere, they say they feel strongly in a completely different way, and they claim that this is how they've always felt.

I think it would be good if the American people would focus on something more important, like the broken political situation, rather than getting 3 stars on every level of Angry Birds on every platform. You want something, I want something. You don't always get what you want.

Franken is discovering the senatorial version of academia's Publish Or Perish edict. In his case it's Cause A Hearing or perish.

And as his ill-informed flame out to bring Apple to their knees in front of his mic, he has shown how even an appreciator of ironical things can turn doofus.

Now he's doing the Rule Number Two thing: backpedal. Attempt to make everybody believe your faux concern was really a thing you believed in.

Franken: that's IT! No more donations from me.

Hey Al Franken -- why don't you do something useful and fix the stupid patent situation?

I think it would be good for Senator Franken to focus on important things like economy rather than harp on companies like Apple and Google. Big hits on Twitter and the blogosphere don't mean a senator needs to be involved.

I think this is a great idea and I hope Apple/Google embrace it but I think it needs to extend far beyond location-aware though and extend to any analytics, advertising, or other data-gathering that occurs in apps & games.

Privacy needs to be taken seriously by users, developers and the platforms developers use - and I say that both as a platform (http://playtomic.com/) and a game developer.

It is much appreciated that TUAW has reported this story from a politically neutral standpoint, as opposed to the hacks over at MDN who always report from just to the right of Rush Limbaugh.