Among international outrages, depriving citizens of personalized maps seems far down on the list.
Still, that was the condition put on the introduction of iPhone 3G in Egypt. The government demanded that Apple disable the phone’s global-positioning system, arguing that GPS was a military prerogative.
The company apparently complied, most likely taking a cue from the telecommunication companies that sell the phone there, said Ahmed Gabr, who runs a blog in Egypt, gadgetsarabia.com, and wrote about the iPhone’s release there. “The point is that using a GPS unit you can get accurate coordinates of any place, and thus military bases and so on could be easily tagged,” he wrote in an e-mail message.
I met Gabr last summer in Alexandria, Egypt, at the worldwide conference for Wikipedia. He was typical of the young Egyptians in attendance — hungry for new technology, hopeful about what it would mean for their country.
As much as any country, however, Egypt illustrates the push-me-pull-you nature of technology under an oppressive government.
Young people flock to Facebook, in a way I never could have imagined. In the largest Arab country in the world, Facebook was a way for the educated elite to reach out to one another and to those who had left the country for an even more elite education.
Andrew Bossone, an American in Cairo who writes about technology, said that despite its expense, the iPhone in Egypt was “really popular — everyone knows the iPhone.” In addition to editing a technology magazine, he teaches at the American University in Cairo. “One of my students who comes from a wealthy family has the iPhone, and one of my designers, who is not rich, bought it on credit,” he said.
Bossone said he thought the government would relent on issues like GPS because it would side with business even at the…