Is it officially time to freak out in Apple’s general direction?
Not only does Apple remove applications from the App Store—I Am Rich was taken down yesterday, for example—but it’s now emerged that the company can remotely disable applications from individual iPhones. Apple will only do this in the case of malicious applications (and not merely dumb ones like I Am Rich—if you bought it it’s yours to keep), so that it can eliminate Bad Apps from your iPhone before they case too much trouble.
As long as Apple limits itself to only disabling such apps, I wouldn’t be too concerned. Odds are the Feds are already listening to all of our telephone conversations anyway, so Apple being able to delete a bad app doesn’t really upset me.