Jobs biographer sides with Apple in Facebook privacy feud

Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson has declared Apple "a force for good" for its stance on privacy, but Facebook should also take more responsibility for content it hosts.

Facebook and Apple are in a public war of words, with the social network trying to convince the world that Apple's upcoming privacy changes in iOS are bad for business. In the view of the author of the official Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson, Apple is on the right side of the matter.

"I think we always have to worry about whether tech is a force for good," said Isaacson in a Yahoo Finance interview on Friday. "I think Apple actually is, in general, because it's both protecting our privacy, and it's not basing its entire business model on the advertising model, which means harvesting all of your information and microtargeting things to you."

The interview discussed Isaacson's latest book, "The Code Breaker," but discussed a number of areas, including the ongoing spat between Facebook and Apple.

On the social network, Isaacson suggests Facebook and Twitter need to be more responsible for the algorithms each produces, as they tend to "incent people to get enraged and pass along misinformation."

The author brings up Steve Jobs as part of his reasoning, to explain why Apple didn't go down the route of social media. Isaacson was the author of the official Steve Jobs biography, giving him a high level of access to the co-founder over a number of years.

According to Isaacson, Jobs wasn't comfortable with the idea of Apple creating a social network. "He was very careful in making sure that people had control of their technology instead of the technology having control of them," he said.

The biographer continued in stating Jobs is "a model to me of how people should approach the digital age. And that's why he wasn't that comfortable with social media and social networks."

Apple is currently in the process of launching its App Tracking Transparency feature of iOS, which will force developers to gain permission from users before tracking a device's advertising identifier. Facebook and other advertising-centric companies have fought back against the move, which will make it harder to track users and to serve up personalized advertising.

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11 Comments

GeorgeBMac 11421 comments · 8 Years

About 3 years ago

He is an excellent biographer: I have & have read 3 of his: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

All were excellent.

Steve commissioned him to write his biography and gave him free rein to report it as he saw it. And he did.

It goes to show what kind of man Steve was: brave, secure and full of integrity, unafraid of the consequences of saying and doing the right things. (Although it took awhile for him to reach that point!)

JWSC 1203 comments · 7 Years

GeorgeBMac said:

He is an excellent biographer: I have & have read 3 of his: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.
All were excellent.

Steve commissioned him to write his biography and gave him free rein to report it as he saw it. And he did.
It goes to show what kind of man Steve was: brave, secure and full of integrity, unafraid of the consequences of saying and doing the right things. (Although it took awhile for him to reach that point!)

I’m impressed that you were able to get through Isaacson’s Jobs biography. I got maybe 1/3rd of the way through it before I put it down. And Jobs is one if my heroes in life.

The push from some quarters (including Isaacson I guess) for big tech to take more responsibility for the content they host, while well meaning, is a classic example of “be careful what you wish for, you may get it.”

This well meaning push will result in the concentration of power to unelected big tech to dictate what is acceptable and unacceptable for the public to be informed of. The argument that Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. are not individually monopolies, therefore if you don’t like one you can go to another, falls flat when they act in a coordinated fashion to shut down upstart rivals, which is exact What happened to Parler, ostensibly because it was used to plan the capitol riots, but so were Twitter and Facebook especially.

These companies initially said, all of them, that they didn’t want to be in the business of content regulation. Why the hell are people pushing them to do so now? Do they know what you they asking for?

mark fearing 439 comments · 16 Years

JWSC said:

The push from some quarters (including Isaacson I guess) for big tech to take more responsibility for the content they host, while well meaning, is a classic example of “be careful what you wish for, you may get it.”

This well meaning push will result in the concentration of power to unelected big tech to dictate what is acceptable and unacceptable for the public to be informed of. The argument that Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. are not individually monopolies, therefore if you don’t like one you can go to another, falls flat when they act in a coordinated fashion to shut down upstart rivals, which is exact What happened to Parler, ostensibly because it was used to plan the capitol riots, but so were Twitter and Facebook especially.

These companies initially said, all of them, that they didn’t want to be in the business of content regulation. Why the hell are people pushing them to do so now? Do they know what you they asking for?

Not really. Every company has a right to decide what type of material they will host/publish/create. What you’re arguing for is government mandates telling companies what they MUST host/publish/create. I’m not sure it is wise to demand a private company host and promote items they find distasteful. There’s plenty of common sense laws on the books that give guidance on such issues within the bounds of the constitution. What we need to do is have common sense and allow companies to make these decisions outside of government mandates. If I want to scream nonsense obscenities there’s no reason a tv station must broadcast that.

pk22901 153 comments · 21 Years

Here's a great post on FaceBook's malodorous 'attempts' to fix the violence, anger, and fake news problems.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/

If you read it, you'll see Facebook's AI Team is laser-focused on a fool's errand. Their AI team is a smokescreen for the fact that FB will never do anything corrective that would harm their income. Perhaps the easiest thing for Facebook to do would be to slow down the AI algorithms that optimize engagement (profits) over limiting anger and craziness.