Apple versus Android in Mobile Privacy

My core argument is that our values and what we care about as a society are changing the invention and use of new technology. My generation is more accustomed to putting their information out into the internet because of how we grew up, and the world we grew up in. We grew up using social media and the internet, and as we evolved and changed, so did the internet. Our society and our way of life changed a drastic amount of our infrastructure, by allowing companies to use our newly gained social values for economic purposes. We as a society made it okay for companies to gather our information and monetize it. Our phones, and the apps we use through them, play a huge part in gathering and storing our information. This information is then used to shape the world around us. For example, Apple and Android are the most used operating systems for mobile devices, and therefore are created around the fact that they can be used for gathering and storing information from billions of people. Apple and Android share different views when it comes to the information of their users. According to, Tim Cook (CEO of Apple), Apple does as much as they can to keep information private, to the point where they can't even see it, Android, openly collects data, stores it, and analyzes it for whatever means they could use it for. Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt declared: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place". So as you can see they have different views on the privacy of their users using their products. These statements brought up very good points during the discussion portion of my presentation. Some of my peers were describing how even though we know it is happening, we still use it either way. I thought this was a very good point, considering how much information has been leaked to the public on topics such as this one, because even after all of the information is out there, not enough people seem to care about it because it is so ingrained in our entire way of life. So to answer the question of the week, "What social/economic forces shape communication infrastructure?", we as a society are the force that shapes communication infrastructure through the way we interact with our devices and the internet. We have caused the changes that we see in our phones and other devices. The economic forces that shape our infrastructure rely on our society to continue doing what we are doing so that they are able to continue monetizing our information.

Helpful links: 

https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/digital-lives-of-millennials/

http://college.usatoday.com/2015/04/03/study-millennials-indifferent-about-about-digital-privacy/

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-toeWxr3MJc