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Cellphones

Retrievable iPhone Numbers Raise Privacy Issue 146

TechnologyResource writes "When a couple of voicemails didn't show up recently, I thought nothing of it until a friend asked me if I'd gotten his message — people just don't call me that often. But the iPhone is indeed a phone, as some users are reportedly being reminded when they get phone calls from the publishers of a free app they've downloaded from the App Store. The application in question, mogoRoad, is a real-time traffic monitoring application. As invasive and despicable as that sounds, it raises another question: how did the company get hold of the contact information for those users? Mogo claims the details were provided by Apple, but Apple doesn't disclose that information to App Store vendors. French site Mac 4 Ever did some digging (scroll down for the English version) and determined it was possible — even easy — for an app to retrieve the phone number of a unit on which it was installed."

Comment What about History? (Score 1) 190

Altho I agree that the inertia of keeping records trumps the work of evaluating them, the large financial services company I work for is turning with the tide, starting to focus on deletion and destruction, mainly for potential liability reasons. Not just aged documents, but prior versions, drafts, notes, etc. It makes me wonder what the historians of the future will have left for primary sources--besides the final, signed-off Establishment-sanctioned records of events. Are we on the road to compromising their ability to determine and describe What Really Happened, and thus our own ability to understand our past? Could John M. Blair write "The Control of Oil", or Ron Chernow "Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr." fifty years hence?

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