No, we're not pro-$bigco or anti-$bigco. HN comments just need to be better than this.
I don’t truly believe Apple is interested in user privacy as a core value but it is a hell of a differentiator compared to Google. On this topic, my interests and theirs happen to align for the time being.
Opening the App Store app transmits your hardware serial number to Apple, like a permanent supercookie, linking it to your email address and phone number and city-level location via client IP.
I'd much rather have multiple services, each of them isolated to the data that is relevant to providing their specific service than one service having it all.
Not saying breaches never happen with apple or google of course, it's just less often than your trusty todo list app being pwned and your clear text passwords being dumped online.
You raise a very good point though. You can't judge the security of a company by any metric except their record. It would be interesting to have a registry that logs breaches, how severe they are, and give an overall rating to them.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
I too wish iCloud backups were E2E encrypted, but that is a very different claim from "Apple assumes you desire privacy from everyone but Apple." Apple knows you want privacy from Apple; their privacy policy is quite explicit about what data Apple cannot see.
iCloud Backup is not e2e encrypted, which means Apple either gets the full iMessage and SMS history (in the case of Messages in iCloud being disabled), or gets the e2e encryption key to decrypt the synced Messages in iCloud (which they already have, due to running iCloud).
Your link describes in detail what Apple can and cannot read. They seem to want their customers to know. So how did you conclude "Apple assumes you desire privacy from everyone but Apple?"
If you don’t enable backups for iMessages, they stay on your device.
Nowhere does it describe a back door that the FBI has access to.
The backups are enabled by default, on your device, as well as the devices of everyone else you iMessage with.
For iMessage to be end to end secured, you need to turn off iCloud Backup on each and every device you have, and everyone you iMessage with needs to turn off iCloud Backup on each and every device they have. If either you or your conversation partner misses a single device, Apple will get either the message text itself in the backup (if Messages in iCloud is disabled) or the message sync encryption key (if Messages in iCloud is enabled).
In practice, this never happens. Non-e2e iCloud Backup is an iMessage cryptographic backdoor.
A backdoor is a very specific claim that isn't backed up.
Defaults matter.
Apple had a plan to secure it, and (I understand) a partial implementation. It was killed specifically to aid surveillance capabilities. If that isn't a backdoor, I don't know what is.
You're not going to find proof in the EULA.
Luckily they’re too expensive to be the biggest player in most of the world. But they’re part of a duopoly.
Didn't work, so they try something else to differentiate.
If this wouldn't work, they will just adjust targets.
They failed for multiple reasons:
> With tight creative control of ads, an insistence on taking a 30% cut of all ad revenues, and a prickly attitude to sharing customer data, the platform won few fans in the media industry.
But iAd launched before their "protection of user privacy' stance. Not after it.
= They couldn't monetize it, so only after that they attack it and "protect user privacy".
That's a disingenuous claim. While iAd did predate Apple pushing privacy as a mainstream marketing angle, it certainly did not predate Apple taking a strong position on consumer privacy. This had been a theme in Apple's corporate decisions for at least the past fifteen years, likely longer.
Furthermore your own quoted paragraph belies your own assertion. iAd failed in part because of Apple's "prickly attitude to sharing customer data".
Quotes from a contemporary article:
But advertisers became increasingly perturbed that Apple refused to give them access to the wealth of data iAd had on its consumers from Apple’s hundreds of millions of iTunes accounts.
Stefan Bardega, media agency ZenithOptimedia’s chief digital officer, told us: “iAd has long been a story of unfulfilled potential. Apple has unique customer level data that is hugely interesting to advertisers but has struggled to access that data in a way that doesn’t conflict with the core business.”
Another media agency ... said: “For me, they never understood that they needed to behave like a media owner, rather they could go it alone charging what they wanted, not sharing data, no third-party tracking...”
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-apple-is-pulling-dire...
If you believe Apple's marketing, how do you explain Google not bowing to China and therefore not bowing to China's influence, while Apple seems to be doing just that.
Eg. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-china-censorship-apps-flag...
Caring about user privacy shouldn't have exceptions, no?
I didn't say that you did, in fact I explicitly said the opposite. I don't even know where that quote came from. I just pointed out that YOUR choice of quote contradicted your argument.
> If you believe Apple's marketing
I don't believe their marketing. I believe the profit motive, and I believe their actions they've taken in the face of Government and corporate demands for data access.
> Caring about user privacy shouldn't have exceptions, no?
You are falling into a weird self-defined trap of binary thinking. It seems you're asserting that in order to have concern for customer privacy requires privacy to veto literally all other concerns. I never said—no sane person has ever said—that Apple's concern for consumer privacy is their number one motivating directive. Everything is a matter of degrees; a matter of competing priorities.
Personally I don't pick Apple products to protect my data from my Government. I pick them because I want that pile of data to be siloed away from the likes of Google, Facebook, and the countless number of unethical data aggregators that I've never heard of. Apple's selfish commercial motivation to keep my data away from their competitors suits me just fine.
Put simply, Apple's functional concern for my privacy—regardless of the purity of their motives—works for me.
In my experience, Android users are generally not plagued by this misconception to as great an extent.
Why would a company do something in the interest
of the consumer if it was not in their interest
We call that "ethics", IIRC. It's depressingly rare.
This doesn't match my anecdata, but perhaps things have changed in the past few years.
The lesson here is that it's probably important to do things like the non-apple battery warnings etc because the scammers and hackers will not stop attacking the platform.
The lesson here is that you cannot rely on Apple to act in your interest if they think doing so will hurt them. Note that they aren't special here, any other company will probably act similarly, the difference is that Apple apologists would have you believe they, ahem, think differently.
Important thing to keep in mind is that the emails in the article were from 2015, not 2021. Apple was not marketing privacy as heavily back then as they do now. Not trying to justify their action back then at all, as I firmly believe they should’ve notified users, but context matters imho.
Steve Jobs
All Things Digital Conference, 2010
Notice I didn’t say they weren’t pushing privacy at all, I said not as heavily.
Apple has had privacy and security as a core part of their marketing since forever. They also had a whole set of ads and comments in keynotes about how secure and privacy focused OSX was, taking shots at Windows.
I went back and skimmed through the past decade of Apple commercials, keynotes, and interviews by execs. After doing so I stand behind my point that privacy was not marketed the same pre 2017ish as it was after that. Yes, you’d see mentions here and they, but not until around 2017 did it become center stage and the apparent lens through how everything is viewed.
This is a very subjective thing though, so how about we disagree and commit?
Did the directly affected companies do the notifications?
I thought Apple had sort of a separate setup in china (data center etc) to mitigate some of the issues there impacting the rest of their user base.