Privacy Issues Surrounding Tablet Devices

Motivation

Privacy is a pervasive ethical concern for every form of computing, from laptops to corporate website servers to phones, but there are some issues that are unique to tablet-like devices. Tablets are used in many of the same ways as computers are, in terms of the types of information that people look for on their tablets. For example, tablets are used to read books online, just as laptops are. But tablets often also have proprietary interfaces and aren’t easily modified. This means that a privacy breach on a tablet, especially those that have been created by the company selling the hardware, is not always preventable by even a technologically competent consumer. The convergence of these phenomena gives companies an uncomfortable ability to record the information the consumers of tablets are looking for, without empowering consumers to resist in any way. Whether we can ethically accept these intrusions on our private choices of what we want to know is the question considered in these pages.

Problem

The issue of privacy and tablet devices is actually a number of different issues, each of which confronts the greater ethical problem of information availability by different means. Many of these are real concerns and have arisen from cases or events that have been recently discussed in media. The details of those events are given in the page on case studies.

Here are some major themes:

  • Consumers don’t even know what information is being stored regarding what they read, where they go, or any other thing that their tablet device might know about them. Even a consumer who has an idea of what’s been recorded about them doesn’t have the ability to prevent it from happening, because this often occurs in a proprietary and inaccessible part of the system.
  • The distributors of digital content have the ability, and in fact exercise it, to remove books at whatever time for whatever reason. Our access to information is controlled by them. What is their ethical right to determine what content is available to the public? Doesn’t this give them excessive control over what is rightly public material?
  • Those companies that store consumers’ information, even if they never look at it themselves, are still vulnerable to attacks from other less benevolent entities. One attacker, for example, stole 114 000 emails of iPad users soon after it was released. Although in this case it was not Apple’s fault, there remains a question of the responsibilities of companies that preserve so much information about us.

Next: Case Studies, Technologies and the Future

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