Metadata, Jailbreaking, and the Cybernetic Governmentality of iOS: Or, the Need to Distinguish Digital Privacy from digital privacy

Digital privacy tends to be understood as the “top-down” regulation and control of personal information on the behalf of corporate and governmental institutions, realized through various policies and practices. While smartphone manufacturers increasingly innovate and alter their policies and practices to reflect new and ongoing cyber challenges, they tend to emphasize the protection of personal information in the form of content data. On the other hand, there is metadata: the measurements and math of content data. Abundant and ubiquitous in their discrete movements, they are the most precious commodity in the world of big data mobile analytics. Smartphone metadata are also one of the most pressing privacy concerns precisely because it is exceedingly difficult to see, study, and analyze. However, there is another realm through which digital privacy exists: a realm where the inability to see and study metadata is unacceptable. This entirely differently realm is comprised of jailbreakers—a network of hacktivist programmers injecting software-based “tweaks” into Apple mobile devices in ways that reveal metadata to users and allow users to control them. By doing so, jailbreakers allow users to build previously unrealized relationships with metadata and thereby radically distinguishing “top-down” Digital Privacy from “bottom-up” digital privacy. Although Apple has routinely resisted jailbreaking citing fears over device instability, user security vulnerability, and Terms of Use violations, this article reveals that many key privacy-first jailbreaking tweaks undermine Apple’s ability to monopolize metadata flows. Theorised through a cybernetic governmentality, this intervention demonstrates the extents to which Apple goes to reify its profit-first vision of information protection, one which insulates many metadata flows from its users. Through this theoretical approach, we as analysts can critically glean awareness of the politics of the (in)visibility and (il)legibility of metadata and the role they play in the discourse on digital, mobile data protection.