This week, David McAfee of Bloomberg Law reports on a new legal ethics opinion from the New York State Bar Association, Opinion 1240 (4/8/2022) (PDF download link). The opinion addresses smartphone apps that ask for permission to access Contacts on a lawyer’s smartphone. Contacts will often include entries for clients of the lawyer, and these entries can sometimes be confidential. For example, the fact that a client has even sought the advice of the lawyer is sometimes confidential information, and that confidential information could be exposed to a third party by virtue of giving an app access to all Contacts. The opinion recommends considering whether entries in Contacts are “identified as clients, as friends, as something else, or as nothing at all,” and also recommends considering whether the entry includes addresses, phone numbers, financial data, or any other non-public information. The conclusion of the opinion is: “If ‘contacts’ on a lawyer’s smartphone include any client whose identity or other information is confidential under Rule 1.6, then the lawyer may not consent to share contacts with a smartphone app unless the lawyer concludes that no human being will view that confidential information, and that the information will not be sold or transferred to additional third parties, without the client’s consent.” This is an interesting opinion that is worth considering. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Illinois attorney John Voorhees of MacStories reports on a speech that Apple CEO Tim Cook gave this week to an international organization for privacy professionals.
- Christina Caron of the New York Times notes (gift link) that there are thousands of apps that claim to improve your mental health, and she provides advice for determining which apps may be the best for you.
- Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reminds us all that if you give away or sell a pair of AirPods without first unpairing them from your own iPhone, the subsequent user will get all sorts of error messages from Apple’s Find My technology. This is exactly what you would want to happen if the AirPods were stolen. But if you intended to transfer ownership, it can be a real pain, especially for companies that specialize in refurbishing AirPods.
- Cade Metz and Adam Satariano of the New York Times report (gift link) that as many as 100,000 tech workers have fled from Russia in light of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The article notes that these tend to be “young, educated, forward-looking people” and thus their exodus could have economic ramifications for the future of Russia.
- Sheena Vasani of The Verge reports on a new free iPad app called Staybl. It is designed for people who have Parkinson’s or other health issues that cause hand tremors. The app features a web browser, and when the app senses through the accelerator that you are shaking your iPad, it moves the web browser in the opposite direction so that the web page appears to stay in the same place.
- I’ve long been a fan of the Deliveries app; here is an updated review that I wrote in 2017. I like having a central place to store tracking information for different delivery services. Unfortunately, a recent post by the developer notes that, in the future, the app will no longer be able to show tracking information directly in the app because of changes being made by shipping companies. The app will continue to work, but it will have fewer features—although the developer notes that “we’ll do our best to keep making it as useful as we’re able to.”
- My wife and I recently dined at a restaurant where there were no menus. Instead, there was a QR code at the table that you scanned with a smartphone to bring up the menu page of the restaurant’s website. This is just one example, but I’ve noticed that QR codes are on the rise recently. They are convenient, often saving you the trouble of typing a website address, but there is a security risk as well. What if a criminal covers up a QR code with a sticker containing a different QR code that directs you to a malicious website that tricks you into providing your personal information? Stacey Harris does a good job of explaining all of the risks of QR codes in a post on the 1Password blog.
- For All Mankind and Ted Lasso are two of my favorite shows on Apple TV+. Nellie Andreeva of DEADLINE reports that actress Jodi Balfour, who plays Ellen Wilson on For All Mankind, will have a major recurring role in the next season of Ted Lasso.
- Speaking of For All Mankind, the show returns to Apple TV+ for Season 3 on June 10, as reported by A. Khalid of Engadget. Season 3 takes place on Mars in the year 1995. (That’s the same year that, as a first-year associate, I helped my law firm create its first website. You can still see it, in all of its glory, using this link thanks to Archive.org, including my original bio page. Yikes!)
- Speaking of Apple TV+, last week the service aired the season finale of Severance. That show got better with each episode and the season finale was great—but also frustrating because it ends with a cliffhanger. If you haven’t watched Severance yet, half of me recommends that you do so now because it is such a good show. The other half of me recommends that you wait until the week before Season 2 comes out to soften the blow of a cliffhanger followed by presumably a year or more before we can see what happens next. After you do watch the first season, Ben Travers of IndieWire has a good wrap-up, which includes interviews with show creator Dan Erickson and director/executive producer Ben Stiller. Severance is one of those rare TV shows that I want to watch a second time, but I may wait to do so until the second season is approaching.
- And finally, if you want to see some really interesting pictures, I urge you to check out this page on the Apple website devoted to the winners of Apple’s recent iPhone macro photography challenge. Folks used the macro lens on an iPhone 13 Pro or iPhone 13 Pro Max and submitted their best pictures to an international panel of judges. The winning entries are fantastic. Here are two of my favorites, but go to that page where you can not only see the picture, but you can also read what the photographer had to say about each picture and what the judges had to say about why they liked each picture.
