La Salle Professor: Apple And Google Were Just As Surprised As The Rest Of Us About NSA Phone Data Collection
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Bill Weaver, La Salle University professor of Integrated Science, Business and Technology spoke with Talk Radio 1210 WPHT's Jeff Bolton about the effect that the NSA spying is having on the future of phones.
"I'm going to take both Apple and Google and the other large carriers at face value. They were not happy at all when they had discovered that the NSA and some of the other agencies were indeed 'hoovering up' people's data without their knowledge. It was almost as if it was sort of an internal spying campaign, even the large executives at Apple and Google were not not aware that this was happening. Now of course, I could get out my roll of aluminum foil, put my hat on and say that they're all the same people, but these private companies were just as affronted that the federal government was pointing some little codicil inside the patriot act that said that 'we can do this without your knowledge."
Weaver points out that while the Apple, Google, and Amazon's of the world say that you "opt-in" or "opt-out" of programs like this, but when it comes to the federal government "apparently we don't have an opt-out button that we can press to say 'please, don't look at my stuff."
He feels like the first thing that will be taken care of in the private sector to remedy this will be doing something about the two year contract that is a mainstay in many cell phone plans.
"Two years, at least in technology space is a pretty long time and to be locked in to a carrier or locked into a particular phone and find out that your company is not behaving the way that you life, that idea of breaking the contract is becoming more important to being able to than being able to march and sort of vote with your feet and go with whatever carrier—reward them for being good actors and punish the bad actors."