Jobs: Apple has "moral responsibility" to block iPhone porn; jabs Android (again)
Summary: Steve Jobs makes no apologies for rejecting pornography in the iPhone app store, singles out Android as the platform for adult content.
Steve Jobs has already said once, in an e-mail reply to a customer, that rejecting an iPhone app submitted by a (now) Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist named Mark Fiore was a mistake. (And is being fixed.) But in another Steve Jobs e-mail sent to another customer, the Apple CEO makes no apologies for blocking porn apps on the iPhone.
Techcrunch has posted an e-mail exchange between Jobs and customer Matthew Browing, noting that Jobs has lately been on a roll of sorts when it comes to answering customer's e-mails. In an e-mail sent to Jobs, Browing - an admitted convert to Apple products after the iPhone 3G came out - said he was starting to have a "philosophical issue with your company" and told Jobs that Apple's role isn't moral police but rather maker of cool consumer gadgets. He wrote:
It appears that more and more Apple is determining for it’s consumers what content they should be able to receive... I’m all for keeping porn out of kids hands. Heck – I’m all for ensuring that I don’t have to see it unless I want to. But… that’s what parental controls are for. Put these types of apps into categories and allow them to be blocked by their parents should they want to.
To which Jobs replied: "...we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone." (I fixed a typo for him.)
So there you have it. If you have a particular fetish for... well, that's your business... on a mobile device, then you should probably re-think the iPhone. And this is the second time Jobs has pointed out the availability of porn for the Android devices. The first was during a press Q&A after the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0.
Here's the thing: Jobs is absolutely right. Clearly opposed to pornography, Jobs surely realizes he can't make it go away completely. But he doesn't have to contribute to the spreading of it - especially in a place where children often shop using a technology that many parents still don't understand well enough to police. (As a parent, I can appreciate where he's coming from.) Jobs has taken a position for his company and he is sticking by it. There's no shame in that. In fact, he's earned my respect for it.
I still have some concerns about Apple's control over content as it relates to journalism and news outlets - but that's a different debate.
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Talkback
Jobs Is A Control Freak
As long as Jobs lives I will never give Apple a single penny of my hard earned money.
and a moronic old fart, too...
IRONIC: Who's the control freak?
right do you have to tell him how he should run his company?
How is it his job?
If I build a home, it is none of my business if the people who bought the home choose to have orgies every Friday night and post the videos on Youtube.
Once I BUY a computer, what I do with it is my business, not the government's, not Jobs.
This astroturf terror of kids getting their hands on porn is merely an excuse to control people and try to create the type of utopian society that JOBS wants us to have. That kind of thinking is far too common in this increasingly socialistic world.
I am NOT my brother's keeper, nor is Jobs' mine.
As a parent, RAISE YOUR OWN BLASTED KIDS! Stop trying to infringe on the rest of the world because you couldn't keep it in your pants and are too lazy to do the work of raising the results.
It's certainly...
You can do what you want with the iPhone
to complaining that McDonalds doesn't have
strippers. You can jailbreak your phone and put
any app you want on there.
Now I am against Apple trying so hard to prevent
people from jailbreaking their phones. If they
want to void their warranties thats their right.
Excuse me
censorship not justified ??? technology should enable free flow of info!!
information as they desire.
The zen of the mac is that the tools don't get in the way of your work.
Apple's new-found success with consumer products seems to have turned this
ethos on it's head! Apple now seems to be obsessed with limiting what you can
not do with their tools, rather than what you can.
Steve Jobs -in an obessional persuit of vindication for his ouster in the 80's - is
destroying tge very brand he was instrumental in originally creating in the 70's.
This new regime of thought control is a deep insult to apple's loyal customers
who carried the "think different" torch in the dark days.
And there doesn't seem any limit to where this Bowlderization is headed: it's not
just naked bodies that are being excised: the Dali Lama, no less, is also
censored from the iTunes store in china! The perverse irony that Jobs is
supposed to be a Buddhist doesn't seem to present any qualms for him to
cravey submit to a microsoft-worthy level of appeasement to a communist
dictatorship!).
censorship is the antithesis of a civilized, open society; where beliefs are
formed & testied by individual experience not just social tradition; where
knowing how to formulate the right question is just as important as repeating
the right answer; where the right to critiicize & dissent is enabled -not impeded-
by the tools & conventions at man's disposal.
Information - like the human spirit - yearns to be free. Our machine are
supposed to liberate us not shackle us.
the time is soon approaching where even the most devoted apple enthusiasts -
like me- will realize (sadly but inevitably) that the time has come for Steve Jobs
leave before the damage he does outweighs the good he does.
Totally agree with you...
Steve Jobs wasn't elected as a law maker, or moral policeman for the whole planet. He's a salesman and once we buy his stuff we can do with it as we like. I worked hard for the money to buy an iPhone, but Stevo thinks it's a licensed product and he's the owner...WRONG! It's mine, I jailbreak it, put porn in it, the Dalai Lama, the Pulitzer winning cartoonist he banned from the Apple Store and every go-dd-amn thing I like. That's my right. PARENTS: Take care of your kids, the TV, the teenage baby sitter, the state or stupid Steve Jobs won't do the job for you... Don't come crying when they are 15 crack addicts!
If porn is so bad... why is that PLAYBOY APP still exist in the Apple store?
It is still all about choice
A common theme amongst the Anti Apple crowd.
business can decide to sell what it wants to sell. It's also odd that so
many need porn so desperately on their mobile phone that they want
companies that don't sell and have never sold porn to be forced into
selling porn in their own stores.
[i]This is just another example of his psychotic desire to rule the
world.[/i]
Yes, one G-rated App at a time. Muhuhahahaha!!!
A common theme amongst the APPLE FANBOY crowd
brainless zombies. It's just a corporate entity
people! If the product is good, go and buy it. No
need to kiss the CEO's feet.
You must blindly embrace everything apple does
Brainless, is attacking an opinion you agree with.
embrace everything apple does like
brainless zombies. [/i]
So you have no meaningful critique about the substance of what I wrote
and can't make a counter argument? But you still attacked. Sounds like
you're the brainless zombie, mate.
[i] It's just a corporate entity
people! If the product is good, go and buy it.[/i]
That is [b]Exactly[/b] the point I was making. It's a free market. If you
don't like the product Apple makes, than buy another- Don't whine about
how you're entitled to have Apple provide you with porn. Seems like you
agree with Steve Jobs but still attacked because you hate Apple.
Do You Remember Beta vs VHS ?
That is a dead paradigm
zero role. Porn is completely in the domain of the internet now. all of
which is accessible through the iPhone anyway.
Furthermore, people have been buying millions of iphones and over a
billion Apps so far with no porn so you can't say it has hurt anyone.
nt
which is accessible through the iPhone anyway."
Problem for iPhone users though is that most smut sites display their videos in Flash, so aren't accessible by iPhone.
Personally, I prefer to view my porn on a big screen in the comfort of my own home, rather than on a tiny screen on the bus to work, but maybe I'm just a prude?
It wasn't just pr0n
1) The quality difference was negligible,
especially on (for example) an old tube
Motorola console vs. a brand new solid state
Trinitron.
2) You could get a VHS machine for $300 while
Beta was going for twice that. It wasn't so
much VHS vs. Beta, but VHS vs. doing without.
3) Beta was slower at getting out tapes that
had a 2-hour or longer runtime, which would let
you tape a movie off of TV. VHS's longer
runtimes would also make it easier to tape
sporting events. And once Beta came out with
slower recording speeds, Beta's vaunted quality
difference really began to diminish at those
slower speeds.
4) Sony wasn't as aggressive at licensing Beta
as JVC was with VHS. The only Beta licensees
of note were Zenith (which sold rebadged Sony
machines) and Sanyo. Sound familiar?
5) The rental market really cast its vote to
VHS with the wider number of available tapes
and installed base of machines, making VHS's
numbers advantage snowball.
Not quite the same...
But today porn can be downloaded or accessed through any computer, making it easy to get 24/7 wherever you are. I'm not anti-porn in any way, but I do kind of respect Jobs for saying his iphone will not be a tool for porn. Whether this will really effect the sales of the iPhone remains to be seen, but as other have said here, we are all free to purchase another phone if we feel that strongly against what Jobs is doing. He's not saying we can't have porn, just not on his phone.
Common themes among the internet argument crowd
who like to argue on the internet.