From: Scientific American
by David Pogue
Six egregious instances of technological trust abuse
This month my Scientific American column
tackled the issue of high-tech trust. Bit by bit the Apples, Googles,
Microsofts and, of course, the NSAs of the world have shaken our trust.
They've abused it, one highly publicized breach after another, and left
us fearful and wary.
Here, for your sleep-losing pleasure, are some choice examples of the tech industry's impressive history of trust violations.
April 1998: Microsoft orchestrates a phony grassroots campaign. In
an effort to sway public opinion during the government's antitrust
investigation, Microsoft orchestrated a "grassroots" campaign of letters
to the editor of newspapers in key states. These letters were
apparently signed by "average citizens" but were actually written by staffers at Edelman, Microsoft's public relations firm.
October 2005: Sony is caught planting a "virus" on its music CDs. Technically,
it was a rootkit: a piece of self-concealing software that installed
itself onto your PC. It was designed to modify Windows so that you could
not copy Sony music CDs; it also sent records of your listening habits
back to Sony.
When a firestorm of public outrage
erupted, Sony's response was to offer an "uninstaller" that, in fact,
simply unhid the rootkit program and installed even more copy-protection
software. Eventually, the company recalled the affected CDs and stopped
its CD copy-protection efforts. But the discovery that a company was
willing to spy on its own customers dealt a terrible blow to the
public's trust in big-tech companies. MORE
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