Sunday, January 19, 2014

A Short History of Unsavory Tech Snooping


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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