Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced iCloud — Apple’s new omniscient and omnivorous data management thingy — at the WWDC Monday. For a company that emerged on the scene telling everyone to “think different,” it’s more than a little Big Brotherish.
Take a picture on your iPhone or other collective-approved device and suddenly it’s flung across the sky to who knows where.
Take a photo on an iOS device or import a photo from your digital camera to your computer, and iCloud automatically sends a copy of the photo over any available Wi-Fi network (or Ethernet) to the Photos app on your iOS devices, iPhoto on your Mac, the Pictures Library on your PC, and the Photo Stream album on your Apple TV. So you can show off your shots to friends and family from whichever device you’re using at the time.
That means it’s also sitting on some server somewhere, beyond your control. So you don’t really own your own stuff anymore. You can actively turn some of iCloud’s updating and archiving off, but a whole lot of people either won’t take that action or won’t be able to figure out how to. So now we’ll have our iPhones watching every move we make via the GPS, and slinging our photos and data around to points unknown.
Meaning: A certain congressman from New York would be very very wise to stick to his BlackBerry.
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