Apple talks privacy as a selling point but their actions leave a lot to be desired. They collect MASSIVE amounts of data about their users, possibly as much as Google does. Since Apple is raking in gigantic profits from high-margin products there's little motivation for them to try to monetize the data of their users, but there is absolutely nothing that would prevent them from doing so if they desired.

apple is still the least bad option, but make no mistake, their longer term strategy is all-in on services and content, which means becoming more invasive over time.

i'm planning to get one more iphone (a 14 pro) but it's likely to be my last because of this direction. really hoping that the independent phone developers (pinephone, fairphone, etc.) have a decent consumer (not just techie) offering by the time i need the next phone after that.

Very good points. Additionally, Apple's silence speaks volumes as to what they are really about.

This is a joke, right? Tim Cook is on an anti-privacy spree, using some ridiculous "children protection" slogans as a pretense for invasive, user-hostile changes.

Link for those unaware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202.

Tim Cook is actually completely right to offload scan from the servers to client devices. As a little clueless man you just don't understand world you live in. Every "digital" business is oblige to spy ànd report you by laws you hardly understànd made by people you never elected. People you will never know exist from departments that's ring no bell can request your location, video recording of your from thousands of cameras, your call recordings, your chat logs and all your photos "protected" by 2FA and "encrypted" all from single convinient UI. You have no privacy. It is too late. You can deny it, and this is ok, while you pay taxes and not asking questions. What happen to you if you start making problems to them?

Doesn't apple own an ad network? You can't even restrict which apps are allowed to use the internet in the first place, which is a gaping security hole in the context of protecting you from the apps you have on your phone. They aren't exactly pro-privacy.

To add to this, it's pretty convenient to firewall Android apps with AFWall+

iCloud backups go to Apple as plain text by default because it lets them give data to cops and FBI. Apples privacy stance is marketing, pure and simple.

The FBI asked, Apple delivered: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

>Shouldn't Apple be here too, given their public stance on privacy?

Keyword, "public".

I suppose they lose some competitive advantage if being-mass-scale-creepy-stalker is no longer the norm (or, indeed, legal) in the rest of the industry.