Good from now until Thursday. One time bonus, up to $200 ($20 bonus).

This is a little bit of a wander, so please bear with me. All of this is in appreciation.

First things first, I grew up in New Jersey, and as is the law, I am a lifelong fan of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. I know that I am far from alone in this.

Bruce is winding down his career, just wrote his bestselling memoir, the excellent Born to Run. Bruce also created an intimate one-man-show, Springsteen on Broadway, which sold out every single performance of its entire, just-concluded, run.

Sadly, I was unable to make it to see the show. A missed opportunity that, a bucket list item for me. But Netflix worked with Bruce to create a movie of the show. It is truly wonderful, a soulful gift to his fans who couldn’t make the show.

If you are a fan, this is not to be missed. If you wonder what all the hype is about, this should answer the question. The real magic of Springsteen is seeing him live. And not just for the music, but for the storytelling, the preacher side of Bruce, the showmanship of it all.

OK, moving on. So the headline above talks about grabbing people out of the audience to perform. Meaning, an established artist has someone in the audience (likely pre-vetted, but unrehearsed) come up and perform with the star.

This happens far more than you might think. So much so, that Casey Newton pulled together this thread showing examples of this in action:

https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1074361409012621313

One of the videos from this thread fits this Loop post just perfectly. Bruce and a kid from the audience singing “Growing Up” (embedded in the main Loop post). Don’t miss the part in the middle where the kid plays along and Bruce talks about the lesson he learned about getting his first guitar. And that selfie at the end. What a moment.

Enjoy!

Reuters:

Apple Inc , facing a court ban in China on some of its iPhone models over alleged infringement of Qualcomm Inc patents, said on Friday it will push software updates to users in a bid to resolve potential issues.

And:

Earlier this week, Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered a ban on sales of some older Apple iPhone models for violating two of its patents, though intellectual property lawyers said the ban would still likely take time to enforce.

A ban would have cost Apple many millions of dollars, as well as damage to its brand in China. This story is still unfolding.

Apple:

Cupertino, California and Austin, Texas — Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.

Check out this map, showing Apple’s projected US employment by 2022:

And this map, showing Apple’s current US employment numbers/distribution:

The mind reels at this success story. Especially when you think back to that comment (please tweet at me if you can find a link for this) Michael Dell made about buying Apple for couch cushion money.

Got some great advice a long time ago. In a nutshell, avoid shoulda, coulda, woulda. As in, I shoulda bought Apple stock when it was $12 a share, pre-split.

But it is fun to imagine what a $10,000 investment back at the IPO would be worth now (by my math, about $4.3 bmillion).

Gotta love this Steve Jobs quote, courtesy of MacDailyNews:

I saw a lot of other people at Apple, especially after we went public, how it changed them. A lot of people thought they had to start being rich. A few people went out and they bought Rolls-Royces, they bought homes, and their wives got plastic surgery. I saw these people who were really nice, simple people turn into these bizarre people. I made a promise to myself: I said, ‘I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past 10 years.

I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important. I never did it for the money.

UPDATE: First things first, wow was my math off!!! Check the comments for the details, but $4.3 million, not $43 billion. But still.

Also, with thanks to @moeskido, here’s a link to an article about Michael Dell walking back that “shut down the company, return the money” comment.

New York Times:

The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.

One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.

Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.

An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.

And:

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found.

And:

More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code from such companies, according to 2018 data from MightySignal, a mobile analysis firm. Google’s Android system was found to have about 1,200 apps with such code, compared with about 200 on Apple’s iOS.

This is a riveting read. And there’s an amazing embedded graphic that takes you on a virtual map travel, following Ms. Magrin’s travels. (Note that the NYTimes didn’t dox her, she allowed the Times access to her data.)

From this Reddit post:

Instead of allowing apps all-or-nothing access to your GPS location, Apple should allow for a granular spectrum of access that the user chooses. This could go deeper and also be on a time- and location-based factor too. So instead of just “Allow or Don’t Allow Access to Location,” after which you’d have to go into the settings to change, there should be the ability to choose between exact GPS location, zip code (or the country’s relevant postal code), county, state, and time zone.

Apple already beefed up its privacy protections by adding “Only while using the app” as an Location Services icon in an iOS update, but it’s time to go further. In addition to the different degrees of location specificity, there should also be an “Allow once” option for situations where the user wants to allow it now but not necessary have that become the Location Services setting for the app that then requires opening up Settings and digging into the app’s preferences to change it.

And from this Motherboard article from Jason Koebler:

It’s not just Facebook: Android and iOS’s App Stores have incentivized an app economy where free apps make money by selling your personal data and location history to advertisers.

And:

The apps on your smartphone are tracking you, and that for all the talk about “anonymization” and claims that the data is collected only in aggregate, our habits are so specific—and often unique—so that anonymized identifiers can often be reverse engineered and used to track individual people.

Some have made the suggestion that users should just turn off Location Services (Settings > Privacy > Location Services). But this is an overreach. Location Services has real value. It lets you find misplaced devices, find people who share their locations with you, lets useful services know when you are nearby.

It’s the misuse of this data, the exporting it as a source of revenue that, in my opinion, is the setting Apple should expose. To me, this is the missing setting:

Settings > Privacy > Location > Allow my data to be exported

And who would ever check that checkbox? Certainly not me.