A very interesting public rant by Steve Jobs, esp the part where he says he was pissed (his word) about Flurry spotting experimental Apple products that were flying around the net with clear identification saying they are something new from Apple. I mean come on, how naive can you be? Is Apple really that freakishly vulnerable? If Steve thinks it's confidential, maybe he should take some steps to protect the info? 

That was the first curious thing about his rant. The second thing was the utter hypocrisy of it. I don't use that word very often, I try to be understanding of other people's point of view. It's possible he just doesn't know how careless his company is with its users' secrets.  

Basically, if your Mac hard drive breaks and you want Apple to replace it, they take the old drive, even if you pay for a new one (more than you'd pay at NewEgg or Amazon) and "refurbish" it. Where does it go after it leaves your hands? You have no idea and no say.  

When this happened to me at the end of 2007, I made a huge issue of it, even sending an email to Steve Jobs. It was so unbelievably reckless. Are they shipping the hard drives to Nigeria? Do they know there's a thriving business in recovering data like bank account numbers and social security numbers from broken hard drives? I mean seriously, most of us don't have the kind of money Steve has. If our bank accounts were cleared out by an identity thief we'd be fairly screwed. Think we'd have a right to be pissed Steve? Maybe you could help us out here and protect our data instead of actively putting it at risk? 

We can talk about it (to paraphrase Steve) when I'm less pissed off. This happened almost three years ago and I'm still angry about it. Not just on my own behalf but because no doubt other users are trusting Apple, and they're doing something that more or less proves that they are not worthy of the trust.  

Update: An intelligent discussion of this topic on Hacker News.