Naiyas

rorschachai said:
If you give information to a company, they can share what you’ve given them. No different than if I called up a friend and said “I’m at the parking lot on X Street.” If the police go ask my friend where I was, they are free to tell the police what I said.

If you don’t want your information shared, don’t share it. Fortunately, to the chagrin of less scrupulous companies that want to vacuum up your data, Apple makes it easy to prevent sharing information you don’t want to share. Like location data. When Facebook asks for permission to see your location, say No!

Unfortunately you are wrong from a global perspective. The ability of a company to freely share your information is dependent on your citizenship and the laws imposed on the handling of your date by that country on all companies that handle your data - similar to how US citizens financial interactions come under US regulations globally.

So a company that holds an EU (or UK) citizen’s data cannot share that data with anyone unless the company clearly defines the exact ways and means with which that data can be shared and with whom. A simple read of the T&Cs for iCloud (at least here) shows that information will only be shared with law enforcement upon production of a warrant or court order.

In case anyone was in any doubt that anything you store on cloud services is scanned by the company providing the cloud services… here it is. One of the reasons I run my own private cloud.

Looks nice and close to what I would be looking for from a wireless travel charge product. May consider it in the future, but travel at the moment is a little limited right now…

gavinthain said:

Total Fail. Need a battery version. 

Sorry, but so many people these days do not have wires for their doorbells. No new houses in the UK have wires installed. 

I just don’t get the craziness of the UK when it comes to electrical stuff. They don’t have to provide doorbell wiring - relying on the installation of battery operated stuff - but when it comes to smoke alarms they have to be mains wired rather than allowing fully battery operated installations - resulting in millions now being unsafe because they’re over 10 years old and have never been replaced.

And that’s before I get into the lack of outlets installed that are completely insufficient in number for modern needs! The regulations are so prescriptive but based on the position some 20 years ago. But as always, if you define minimum regulations, builders will race to produce the minimum requirements at the cheapest possible cost.

rotateleftbyte said:

I see this as the carriers snooping on your internet activity is threatened by this. As they sell that data, they see a loss of revenue and want it banned. If that fails, they'll try increasing prices or throttling or something else.

I would tend to agree with this comment. I am based in the UK currently and my ISP is currently Vodafone. They require a user identifiable log in to access their broadband and it’s become abundantly clear over the last 6 months that they really do not like me running VPNs at all.

My employers laptop VPNs to the office - speed of the connection is capped (but not by my office or my router; I run a VPN network and I also have a few devices that will “relay” too, and I also select my own DNS servers at the connection level. All of these so called “enterprise level features” (as Vodafone support call them) result in speed / connectivity issues even on a “business line”. But use a device without any VPN / relay and the full bandwidth is available. So I’m 100% sure it’s Vodafone’s network and they will throttle any traffic that they cannot analyse and then sell the profile of to a third party.

Once my contract is up I’m moving to an ISP that doesn’t associate my connection with a username and password for access.