David Marcucci's Doorstep

Well, it’s been a couple of days now and the app updates have been coming out fast and furious.  You must know, I have almost a full 11 pages of apps on my iPhone. In fact I have to routinely “clean up” my installed apps to make room for new ones I want to try.  My iTunes shows 290 apps on my PC. So while I am used to choosing between app A and app B, I know I can always change my mind since they’re all sitting on my PC waiting to be reinstalled.  What I didn’t think I would have to choose between is OS upgrade or an app, but that is what is happening.

You see, I downloaded a 2.2GB GPS app, NDrive USA (ndriveweb.com), and while this app is horrific at memory management it’s a good little GPS program that gets the job done at a cost of only $2.99. So what’s the big deal? Well, I downloaded it from my iPhone (I do all my app management on my phone) and iTunes just refuses to accept it. I’ve “Transfer Purchases” 4 times and while each time it puts the app in the “Mobile Applications” folder, iTunes still refuses to load it, saying it’s “not a valid application”. This means if I sync my phone iTunes will rip that app off of it like a day old band-aid on a hairy leg.

Typically this would not be that bad (the app thing not the band-aid thing, that would suck) since iTunes let you re-download purchased apps for free, unlike purchased music. So I’d just download it again and off I would go. Well, here’s the twist. That app has been pulled from the store so I can’t download it again. This means if I lose it from my phone for some reason it’s gone. NDrive says they don’t know why the app was pulled and their working with Apple to get it back on the store. Good luck with that.

So let’s recap:

• I bought a huge (2.2GB) GPS app that has super crappy memory management but does what $50 GPS apps do for $2.99
• I purchased it from my phone and downloaded it via wifi so it only exists on my phone
• “Transfer Purchases” moves over the app file, but iTunes refuses to load it as an “app”
• The app is no longer on the app store so I can’t re-download it meaning if I lose it from my phone it’s gone forever
• A sync would erase it (as it’s not in iTunes) and a sync is required to upgrade to iOS4

Oh yeah, that last one…there’s the rub. If I want to upgrade to iOS and get all the awesome features that should have been on the iPhone months ago I’ll lose my app. So, what do I do? I haven’t talked to Apple yet but I plan to. I doubt they will even care about my problems, I mean, they’re not Google. So I’ll keep plugging away trying to find a solution myself. If you have any bright ideas please leave me a comment.  If I figure this out I’ll update the post.

Social media is the new hot trend online. Whether it’s on your PC, iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, or cell phone, social media wants to take your private life and make it public. Everyone is doing it so it must be safe and if you don’t you’ll be asked a million times, “Why aren’t you on Facebook?” Still, like anything else, if you don’t know what you’re doing you open the door for (personal privacy) violation.

Even at a young age I was aware of personal privacy. When I was about 13 or 14 I got a CB radio for my birthday because I thought the concept of an open medium for people to communicate was pretty cool. (I’m sure I didn’t express it that eloquently back then.) Still, I was aware these people were in fact strangers. Even before my parents had the “you don’t know these people so don’t give them any information about yourself” talk with me, I was very careful about hiding my age, where I lived, my real name, etc. This was in fact my first brush with social media.

Little did I know how big it would get. Now with the countless outlets for social media online and everything being “indexed” by Google, it’s hard to keep some things private.  For instance, I found a old friend online the other day and sent her a message asking if she had kids, where she was living now, who she married, etc.  Before she could reply I did a Facebook, Google, and Yahoo search and got all the answers to my questions and more. A little freaky. (Hopefully she wasn’t freaked out.)

Another great example. Foursquare, a new (to me anyway, I resisted for some time) social media app where you “check in” real time to real places and get points, allows you to add locations that it doesn’t already have in it’s database. It has some good privacy features, like allowing you to check in as “off the grid”, thereby hiding where you are, but you have to know to use them.

I thought about adding my home as a location but I wanted to be sure I could “hide” it. When I couldn’t quickly see how to do that I decided not to add it. However, I did a search for “home” near my current location. Four entries came up (just within my local area), with GPS locations, addresses, and “Mayors” listed. (A Mayor is a person who checks in to a location a lot.) I realized these “Mayors” just published their home locations to the world.  As I was looking at each one someone checked in, virtually telling me, a stranger, they were home. Also, by looking as when the mayor last checked in I could just as easily tell who wasn’t home.

So while all this social media can be fun don’t let the anonymity of the Internet give you a false sense of security. Remember, you are only anonymous until you are not, and if you start posting about your private life you lose that anonymity while those who are reading your information retain it. My suggestion, make sure you have someone you trust and who knows about social media privacy check your account settings for all the various sites and apps you use. They can give you some feedback on your social media services and you may be exposing more than you realize. Sometimes without a friend watching your back you may never know just how much personal data you’re putting online.

(When looking for computer help please stay away from people who you describe as “knows about this stuff”, “is good with computers”, or “whiz kid”. We call those people “Best Buy Geek Squad”. Make sure you could describe them as a “Online Privacy Expert” or “Computer Security Professional”.)