Apple keeps a very close eye on its app store, and it rejects anything “controversial” or “pornographic”. For example, it banned a cartoonist Mark Fiore’s app, and reversed that decision only after Fiore won a Pulitzer. And it recently banned a bunch of “overt sexual content” from second-tier publishers, while retaining apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated.
Here are Steve Job’s latest remarks on the controversy:
Fiore’s app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.
“You know, there’s a porn store for Android,” Jobs said. “You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.”
It’s funny and telling that someone who clearly thinks that he’s the coolest guy around can still mouth bullshit like “moral responsibility” 15 years after the Internet transformed the way we look at porn. And it’s also telling that Google, the maker of Android, keeps a much looser rein on the apps used by its phone.
Apple’s moral responsibility is to make good hardware and software. I want to use my their products to control my life, not the other way around. If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds.
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