Yesterday the Blackberry got canned in Saudi Arabia. Turkey hates the Blackberry while India and China are looking at the ubiquitous hip device as a candidate for control. Why, you ask? Is it because the product is Evil? No.
The Blackberry format of mobile device has encryption. Pretty good encryption actually. The consumer models aren’t quite a strongly protected as the business models with a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) in the back of the house. Blackberry doesn’t route their stuff through ‘common’ carrier servers: Research in Motion (RIM, the lads who own Blackberry) runs the email side with their own servers. Many of the servers are in Waterloo Ontario, not far from the RIM HQ, here in Canada.
What is causing the “Blackberry Ban” is that RIM won’t let the governments of various countries stick their noses into what the Blackberry users are saying, sending or texting. Without a Blackberry proxy server in Turkey or Saudi Arabia for instance, the state security agency can’t monitor what the citizens are doing. Which also explains why India and China are considering banning the Blackberry. Heavens forbid that some citizen of those countries might have something positive to say about Pakistan or Tibet. The World Will End!
Where the icky part comes in, is the other mobile manufacturers. How much are they complying with the various governments. Apple, that paragon of all goodness must be playing footsie with the Saudi government, which means there is no ban on the iPhone. Google’s Android isn’t outlawed in Saudi. Nor is anything running the Windows Smartphone, Palm, or any of the other manufacturers. Only Blackberry.
The paranoid out there will suggest that Google has given access to the various governments involved. The cynical will suggest that Steve Jobs has handed over the keys to the iPhone so Turkish State Security can monitor all the iPhone fanboys downloading the latest instalment of Twilight, or another wretched Adam Lambert video. Of course, we are not paranoid, or cynical.
Anyone who has a ‘smartphone’ regardless of manufacturer, should have a proper mindset. The preeminent characteristic of that mindset is that the manufacturer is watching over your shoulder, watching every website you visit, every email you send and every text you tap to every contact in your address book.
They’re looking for keywords that describe your shopping and social habits to sell to advertisers, for money. The big profits for any smartphone company is not in the airtime or the data plan. The big money is in market intelligence. Where do you go? What do you talk about? Who do you talk with? What stores do you go by? When do you sleep? What time do you leave the house? What tunes do you listen to? What videos do you watch on your phone? What websites do you use? What apps do you use most often?
Yes, all that data is readily mined from your smartphone, especially if you have a ‘mobile’ app that features GPS locating.
Am I near a Starbucks? Well, the app can’t know if you are, unless the app knows where you are. How does it know where you are? Interrogate the onboard smartphone GPS and it will tell the app, plus or minus a few meters, exactly where the phone is located, the phone conceptually being attached to you hip. Interrogate the database of Starbucks locations to find the ones closest, then display the locations on a map.
You can now walk the block and a half to get your double-decaf, half-caf, soymilk, lite foam, half Splenda-half sugar, cocoa-dusted with a single shake of cinnamon, triple espresso latte chillerama with medium ice, only a little caramel topping and extra napkins with two straws, one that bends and one that doesn’t. By the way, that order makes you a complete asshat.
Which means Mindset Number One for a smartphone user is that you have been ear-tagged like a dairy cow. Willingly. In fact you paid for the privilege of being ear-tagged and pay every month when you pay your wireless bill. You pay for the ‘convenience’ of those apps and you pay again when your carrier resells the aggregate market intelligence to advertisers. Do you think those targeted text messages from sandwich shops, clothiers or other advertisers just magically appear on your smartphone as a random guess that you might be near an outlet? The answer is No.
As for nefarious uses of smartphones, we have to define nefarious. To the Saudi government that could mean trying to open a website that tells you about the beaches at Haifa. Israel does not exist to Saudi Arabia. Therefore anyone wanting to find out about the beaches at Haifa must be insane, Jewish, or drunk, three things you are not allowed to be in Saudi Arabia. Cross-tabulate that with your smartphone GPS and we now know where to send the squad car and the guys with the nets and the leg irons.
Perhaps the important question to ask is not why the Blackberry is under scrutiny by foreign governments, but why other smartphone manufacturers are not.
RoadDave 