Having worked there for a time, in my opinion privacy is deeply ingrained in the company culture. Much easier solutions are avoided if they sacrifice the customer's privacy. Further, it seems many of the decisions are made to minimize the amount of information required at each step to the absolute essentials. These concerns permeate internal technical discussions -- it is not just marketing materials.
They also have pretty extensive privacy materials on their website [2, 3]. While that may not be useful to the HN crowd, hopefully it makes privacy more accessible to some segment of their customers who actually read it.
References: [1] PDF warning: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02874.pdf [2] https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/ [3] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
they didn't offer this option I had to suggest it but basically I'll have to reformat the drive before taking it in for service.
I've managed to get this concept across to authorised repairers who don't speak english (and I don't speak Thai).
FileVault 2 encrypts your entire boot volume, so there's no separate encryption of your home folder going on. If you give someone any of the passwords that unlock the boot volume, they could get all of the data off it (by using target disk mode or booting to single user mode, etc.)
Having said that, prior to my recent visit (failing mbp fan) my trips had always been for failing/failed discrete graphics (about 5 trips on 2 different generations of 17" mbp) so a reinstall is inevitable because making macOS work properly after a mainboard replacemnt is more work than reinstalling from scratch
- Boot into single user mode...
# mount -uw /
# rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
# reboot
Reboot the machine and it walks you through a re-run of setting up the OS X set up assistant, which allows creation of an admin account.
Can't wait until they build this into the auto-correction...
You need to change it now.
Doing it on-device has other advantages besides privacy (e.g. it works without an Internet connection).
> Apple's directions aren't as good as they could be because Maps randomly segments trips and masks its users identity.
Could you explain that? I didn't really understand what you mean by segmenting the trips and why that should masks the user identity.
> Apple's App Store revenues are lower because they limit how apps can identify users.
You're comparing them to Google here. One could ask why apps can identify their users at all?
A trip from your house to the sex doll shop
vs.
A trip from your house to the busy thoroughfare a mile away + trip from busy thoroughfare to the next town over + trip from next town to sex doll shop
Google is the hugest ad network based on gobbling all privacy from everywhere while Apple is an overpriced hardware seller, of course it will do better on privacy than google. But this does not make apple a privacy oriented company.
Having been a *nix admin for a hair under 20 years, I prefer only Free & OpenBSD to macOS.
To me, it’s: “a company whose profit incentives are aligned with their user’s privacy.”
You can go on and on about whether they’re “truly” privacy-oriented but to me that’s a meaningless distinction; a company’s profit incentives are the very definition of what they’re “oriented” towards.
It's overpriced if you could make more revenue by lowering the price.
I think this is less about privacy and more about control. Only Apple apps are allowed to track Apple users.
Can Apple phones only call or text other Apple phones? Where is the 'buddy list'/graph/contact database that can't be easily ported to another social network?
This difference is deeper than business models. Compare Google's Hands Free with Apple Pay for example: the same business model (collecting interchange fees) but Apple's approach preserves user's privacy at the cost of some convenience, while Google's is arguably more convenient but informs both Google and the merchant as soon as you enter into the store.