I've resisted the urge to offer a hot take on the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Apple. While I will admit to being puzzled by what little of it I have read and what I have read about, and while my years of teaching university-level writing has given me a good sense of good-rhetoric and good argumentation, I am well aware that legal writing exists in a very different world than I inhabit.
As I regularly tell my classes, good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, and legal and illegal are three different thing that do not always overlap.
What I am willing to state here is something that I find particularly irritating about this suit. it is something that is adjacent to it rather than a part of it. And I am well aware that those who are critical of Apple's practices (even those who like Apple) may feel that my irritation should be limited by what they perceive to be Apple's bad decisions and prior practices.
Nevertheless, what bothers me is that this lawsuit (unintentionally, I suspect) strikes at Apple's commitment to user privacy.
What made me think of this was when I pulled my Chevy Volt out of the garage this morning and chided myself for not having replaced the belt on my garage door opener.
Both General Motors and the Chamberlain Group have tense relationships with Apple and its CarPlay and Home services/frameworks. Neither like the way Apple has built a firewall between the data they can mine from their customers.
It is data that, as the New York Times has reported (Follow this link for the initial story: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html) they can sell and that can impact people's lives in unexpected ways.
One of the reasons I pay more for Apple's goods and services is their commitment to protecting my privacy from those companies that would view my data as a profit center rather than something they have been entrusted with.
That is a choice the market offers. There are other options for those who either aren't as concerned about that exchange or (as unfair as it may be) who cannot afford that expense.
If I saw the Department of Justice making a similar push against data brokers and their partners and the practices they engage in for conspiracy or invasion of privacy, I would be less irritated. But without that, it feels like they are restricting Apple's ability to provide me with advantages that differentiates them from their competition.