> I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines.
It seems like only a minority cares about privacy concerns to even understand them well and take some action. Even when privacy issues make the headlines, billions of people just shrug their shoulders (and perhaps a few thousand say a curse word or two) but still go back to the same old ways they've been using Facebook, Google, etc.
I feel sad that the winds aren't changing direction, or at least not fast enough to be a force to reckon with.
As they have been doing from the beginning. The masses only act contrary to top level input when desperately hungry. Even their righteous anger is scripted and handed down.
What has been the problem is that the critical non-elite core (say 10%) of society was ignorant of the consequences of these technologies and they are now getting a better sense.
We only have to educate the 10% and only need to provide secure software for these same 10%. Societies change when the 10% no longer accepts the rule of the 1%. This is the primary critique against geek efforts to get "grandma" using crypto. If grandma is part of the 10%, she'll be able to follow step by step instructions.
Even during casual conversations with some of my friends who wouldn't be expected to care about these issues, they occasionally let out a glib "Sorry NSA!" whenever they say something that's known to be picked up by their monitoring.
So there is change. There is a chilling effect. And a big player like Apple making a big deal out of it, does help.
You just gave some very "flashy & visible" examples of Alphabet's influence while citing only a "big pile of cash" as Apple's flashy & visible trait.
Apple have always been the most secretive and they almost NEVER announce something before they're ready to advertise it.
Did anybody see the New Mac Pro redesign coming? What about the fact that they were developing a whole new language for 4 years before anybody suspected it, Swift? Now it's one of their biggest things ever (one of fastest growing languages on GitHub by some metrics.)
Hell, even the PowerPC to Intel jump could be considered a surprise, even though they had been working on it for 5 years. [1]
Now, just recently they revealed a bunch of stuff powered by offline machine learning in iOS 10 and the macOS Photos — all without sending your info to Apple — and frankly I'm more impressed by this and the differential privacy thing than with Google's efforts towards centralized AI.
If one were to make any guesses, I'd say Apple is in a unique position to build an AI network distributed across all their devices, without leaking privacy to Apple or anyone. This is very attractive to me as a user, even if I have "nothing to hide." There are over a billion iPhones and iPads and Macs combined, with beefier processors on average compared to the majority of Androids. Android's fragmentation may also make it harder for Google to pull off the same, even if they were to make a commitment to user privacy.
I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines. EVEN if Apple is just using it as PR ammo, Google and Facebooks are objectively the worst offenders in this area and they don't look so nice and shiny a People's Champion in a privacy-focused future. It may take just one good open-sourced and distributed search engine, or a newer and more hip social platform (Snapchat looks like a good contender there), to unravel all their prospects.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY_ABCZJcpc