So I placed an order for the iPhone 6s Plus, whose major pain in the ass is that it’s too big for one hand manipulation use, despite nifty interface get arounds.
But for many tasks–more and more as the capabilities of Siri increase–the manual interface work arounds become moot, as I will no doubt command Siri to look up the dialing info from my contacts or from a source on the Web.
Everything you say to Siri goes to Apple. Everything.
Telephone metadata is, shall we say, “interesting,” as legions of intelligence agencies and Internet marketing research teams will attest.
So, are they vacuuming the maximum amount of information about where, “who,” and when I call?
In the context of a phone call, the actual voice signal is the data and things like originating number, destination number, and time of day are properly termed metadata about the call. Likewise for a text message there’s a difference between knowing you texted me at 3pm, versus you texted me at 3pm and said “Hi dear. Leaving work. Do I need to stop at the groc for anything?”
There’s a huge privacy difference between giant corporations or intel agencies having the full content data vs. just the metadata. Hence the reason the term “metadata” is so commonly used in privacy discussions.
This is a hotly contested topic, which I’ve done some research on (it’s in my industry, after all). Apple (and Google, and a few others) are challenging DoD (NSA) and FBI legal assertions that they are required to provide things like text data to comply with things like CALEA, FISA, etc.
Trick is, Apple and Google are not service providers/carriers, which is the sort of entity the current laws were directed at. Your cell carrier can’t see “into” your text messages, because the crypto functions are provided on the apple end (similar with a lot of google comms). Both companies have been burned on the PR front in the past, and want to protect their customers in order to protect their market share and brand.
“CALEA”?