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If You Said 'iPhone' And 'Creepy' Recently, You Might Need To Grow Up

This article is more than 9 years old.

Apple updated its privacy policy and CEO Tim Cook wrote us all a message that starts with the pathos of a we-almost-broke-up letter: "At Apple, your trust means everything to us." With that, it might be time to move on from the fact that Apple did iPhoners wrong. They thought you would love that new U2 album slipped under the pillow of your iTunes. But many reacted more like they left a half-dead band right next to your ear. Slate's Chris Wade says:

I’m being hyperbolic with the affront here, but it’s a creepy precedent, and over the weekend I did have to skip over U2 songs I never asked for on my phone.

Whether it's a precedent or not is arguable, but I'm more interested in whether it is creepy.

Two years ago Evan Selinger, in an article you can also find on Slate, concluded an argument about technology creepiness by saying, "Objectors to new technologies need better reasoning than, 'I don’t know why—it’s just creepy, all right!?!'"

Calling a technology creepy these days is a way of saying that we've been naive, up to now, about the possible reach of an application ... and the ways humans are willing to use them. Or it means we are still so afraid of technology's abilities and trade-offs that we'll never get used to them. The origin of the word, to creep, means to move close to the ground and/or slowly. Creepy has a bug-spider connotation and there is an element of slow-surprise that can quickly become terror. Exposure to life's realities tends to calm down the feeling of creepiness. In the tech sense, creepy is understandable with the revelation of a new invasive ability or action. You were probably more creeped out by the breach of iCloud if you hadn't recently considered the depravity of certain people or the ability of scripts to get at your password or both. If you already know that some people are sick—and some of those sick people can code—the iCloud breach was more likely pathetic, unfortunate and a reminder that we need better security strategies (users) and technologies (developers).

Apple's decision to give you a free album was not on that scale. Understanding that creepy does not equally apply to those scenarios is about growing up.

Grow up in the sense of a technology user, that is. Creepy is a little childish as a word, but that's okay. It is a symbol that has come to mean something with context and so it is a useful word. In fact, it's massive increase of use in books the past 10 years signifies something important.

So we do not need to mature linguistically to find a better common term. We need to grow cognitively. The last time the use of creepy had a spike, though much more humble, was in the 1920s ... another era when paradigm-shifting technologies were entering common life. That might be a correlation without a common cause, but it is interesting to compare the two eras. This time the increase in "creepy" usage is much greater and I would argue that the paradigm shift is too. I have lived through all of the Digital Age and it still kind of blows my mind. But maturity implies you are not spooked at every turn of the corner.

What Cook wrote today was glossed but also decently revealing. He writes, "We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t 'monetize' the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud."

He also writes: "One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd." He goes into what that means and concludes that paragraph with, "... and you can always just opt out altogether."

I know a lot of commentators cringe at this notion, but that has to be part of the solution. Short of regulation nightmare, customer savvy has to increase while technology companies' hubris declines. On top of hinting that he's sorry for shoving Bono on your phone, I think Cook is also very subtly hinting at that need for us all to mature.