It's an iPad Privacy Breach Blame Game
You may have heard tell of there being a wee bit of a privacy breach involving the iPad yesterday. The short of it is that a whole lot of iPad 3G users had their Email addresses and the ICC-ID information thrown out into the open air for everyone to see.Who's to blame for the breach? There seem to be two different camps on this issue growing in the Apple blogosphere: One blaming Apple, the other blaming AT&T.Looking to cast the blamethrower at Apple is Gawker. You might remember them from such stories as the purchase of the lost/stolen 4G iPhone prototype, and well... OK, that's some of their very best stuff, really. The folks over at Gawker have spun the story of the breach to imply that Apple's to blame, "...Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads... Given the lock-in and the tight coupling of the iPad with AT&T's cellular data network, Apple has a pronounced responsibility to patrol the network vendors it chooses to align and share customer data with."That's one way of looking at it.TJ Luoma over at TUAW has another view on the topic, and split no hairs in calling out Gawker for laying the blame of the breach on Apple's doorstep in the name of more website hits. "So why is this Apple's fault?" Asks Luoma. "Because Apple has teamed up with AT&T, and therefore -- through the transitive power of magical thinking coupled with a deep desire for web traffic and Digg hits -- Apple is responsilbe for ensuring that AT&T doesn't make any mistakes. Apple is supposed to 'patrol' AT&T's network."Yikes.Reading the TUAW article, it's fair to speculate that the Luoma feels that the blame for the breach can be laid at the feat of the network, in this case, AT&T, and that individual iPad users who chose to use anything but an anyonmous email address, such as the sort that could be snagged for free via Gmail or Hotmail.What's your opinion on this one? Is Apple to blame as they choose to partner with AT&T, and as such, they should be policing the carrier's security policies? Does the blame lay with the carrier? Are each of us to fend for ourselves insofar as the integrity of our personal information security is concerned?Let us know what you think in the comments.
http://www.maclife.com/article/news/its_ipad_privacy_breach_blame_game
