Something for nothing

Nuance released Dragon Dic­ta­tion for the iPhone yes­ter­day, and they made it free. By all accounts, it works pretty well, and should make using an iPhone much more intu­itive for lots of people.

So it should come as no sur­prise that peo­ple are already whining.

See, Dragon uploads your con­tacts to their servers the first time you run it. It does this because all the recog­ni­tion is done in the cloud — you didn’t think it could really do nearly flaw­less voice recog­ni­tion with the iPhone’s RAM and CPU, did you? — and Nuance fig­ures that if they pre-​recognize all your con­tacts, it will save time when you, like, use them. You’re prob­a­bly going to be men­tion­ing at least a few of your con­tacts a lot.

So what’s wrong with this? It’s an inva­sion of pri­vacy, of course! How dare Nuance upload your dic­ta­tion to their servers, tak­ing it lit­er­ally out of your hands, just so that they process it via a free ser­vice you opted into by down­load­ing and installing the gor­ram app in the first place? The nerve! And they keep the record­ings — so that they can con­tin­u­ally refine their recog­ni­tion, the same way Google keeps all your search queries — mean­ing that if you were to use their free ser­vice to dic­tate your plans to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, and if they didn’t anonymize the results — they do — and if said gov­ern­ment went sniff­ing around in those record­ings because the NSA clearly doesn’t already have enough data to sift through, well, that would be pretty bad, wouldn’t it?

Get over it, people.

Look, cloud com­put­ing isn’t the devil, and it isn’t here to take all your pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids. But a cer­tain degree of trust/​sphincter-​loosening is required if you’re going to join us here in the brave new world. Peo­ple need to get over this idea that they even have pri­vacy in the dig­i­tal age. Hey, you, in the shack up in Mon­tana. Yeah, I’m talk­ing to you. If you pos­sess any­thing in dig­i­tal form, guess what? You ain’t the only one with access to it. Deal. Or go back to keep­ing your man­i­festo scrawled in pen­cil on toi­let paper.

Relax, peo­ple, it’s okay. Just lie back, close your eyes and think of Eng­land. Or bet­ter yet, here’s a rad­i­cal idea. If you don’t agree with the terms of ser­vice, DON’T USE THE GORRAM SERVICE! Vote with your dol­lars, all zero of them! Nuance is giv­ing you some­thing valu­able for FREE. If you don’t like the fact that, hey, they’re going to use your anonymized data to improve said ser­vice, set your boots a-​walkin’, mis­ter. It’s the price of admis­sion, and guess what? You’re not enti­tled to any­thing. Keep bang­ing those rocks together, you’ll make fire some­day. But if you want to sit at the grownups table, act like you’ve been there.