People are asking me what I think about the location-gate kerfuffle surrounding Apple. So, it seems an apropos topic to write about here. What exactly is/was Apple doing? It turns out the iPhone 4 was recording cellular tower geographic information and when iTunes backed up the device it also grabbed a file called consolidated.db, which contained latitude and longitude data. The clever and curious started to poke around this data and discovered that the iPhone had data that appeared to indicate where the phone had been and then they mapped the data to make the entire deal visual and accessible by many people who are already very skitterish about location.

Everyone had an immediate attack over this. Claims that Apple was spying on its customers, that it was an invasion of privacy. Claims ranging from the charming right down to the purest of malevolence on Apple’s behalf. Apple noticed the powder keg of negativity that the discovery of consolidated.db brought about and changed iOS to better protect users tender privacy concerns.

Yes, I suppose if you didn’t know the intent and found location data on your phone you might be concerned, but what is this mad rush to the absolute worst possibility? That Apple is spying on you, that it’s collecting location information to use against you? This is the claim of the lazy paranoid with too much time on their hands. What is the value of that data? If you were an international person of mystery and you had grave life-or-death secrets to protect then perhaps you’d have some ground to stand on, but last I checked the average iPhone-toting American leads a very tiny life, unremarkable to anyone at all, and even if it is divulging location, with all the location-based check-in services like FourSquare and Facebook, aren’t you already giving away the keys to your very dull and lame kingdom? I’ll be the first to admit that I fall right into this slot. My life is EXCEPTIONALLY DULL. I travel in circuits that are OBVIOUS and BORING. I’m like a ping-pong ball in a game played with robots that do the same thing every time. I bounce from home to work, from home to Meijers, from home to the comic book store. Boing Boing Boing. What am I protecting? Not a god-damned thing. That’s why I don’t have a problem with online advertisements, tracking cookies, my location leaking out around the edges, or any of that stuff. It’s mind-achingly dull! It runs right along with my feelings of people turning on the iSight camera on my iMac and SPYING ON ME. Knock your socks off! First, I’m not all that pleasant to look at, so that hurts you more than it hurts me, and secondly, what deep dark secrets will you uncover? Perhaps you’ll uncover my most coveted secret of all, that once I develop 5 o’clock shadow I can’t stop itching. There, I’ve saved you all the work and trouble. Dull, isn’t it? Yes. Exceedingly so.

So what is it that people are so worked up about? I think it has more to do with how people want to be seen than actually what is seen. They want to have grand lives full of drama and intrigue, not lives spent planning on how much sour cream to buy tonight to make that one dish come out better this time. It isn’t about what they are protecting, but the image that there is actually something to protect. We are all predictable, regular, non-exceptional, and above all else, magnificently dull creatures! Whatever really awesome specialness we do possess is almost always popping in and out of existence between our ears. Every once in a while we write something down and stuff it away, sometimes we even act on it, but when you take the long view of human behavior it’s more of a dull repetitive machine with little tremors of specialness in between great swaths of inexorably dull events.

So what of Apple’s Location-Gate? Get over yourselves. You aren’t that important. Your lives, frankly, aren’t that interesting. Accept it and move on to the next thing you feel the need to squawk and twitter about ineffectually.