HN discussion at the time (503 points, 302 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6379439

That discussion is fascinating just for how dramatically the tone on Google has shifted in the past 11 years. Top comment is a defense of Google, top reply to them is more concerned with US laws than with Google's voluntary behavior.

I know. It is crazy to me as well. Google went from “Do No Evil” to “Do Profit From Evil” and everyone seems okay with the transition.

And this was after Steve Jobs started the war on Google and mentioned privacy as a concern during his era. It took the world 15 years and nearly 10 years after his death to understand this.

I remember asking people who supported Google before or after their IPO how they make money with your Data. No one cares. I remember pushing for Firefox instead of Chrome in 2009, no one cares. Not even on HN.

The sad thing is that those who stood up for privacy got bashed down for so many years and never received an apology. Those who defended Big Tech like Google is safe to use our data never apologised.

> No one cares.

People do care, they are just sort of powerless to do anything.

Try the following exercises:

- try not to use google docs at work

- try to block google sites from your phone

- try to pay for things on the internet without accessing google/recaptcha/etc

it is both too big and too small of a problem for most people to deal with.

I know most technical people have done these sorts of things, but it is sort of like being your own sysadmin/security researcher. It's probably easier to run your own mail server in comparison.

I want to keep using Firefox, but the performance gap between it and Chrome keeps getting worse. My bank's online site takes upwards of 2 seconds to redraw in Firefox now when I scroll, whereas in Chrome scrolling is virtually instantaneous. Same thing with Google Streetview. PDF rendering in Firefox and Thunderbird takes upwards of 20 seconds to render the first page of common documents, while evince is a few hundred milliseconds. This is on my latop running recent Fedora. I'm still mostly using Firefox, but my patience is almost done.

I know you say chrome is fine but curious what CPU you have?

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

I don't think it's fair to call that "performance gap", when for sure your bank never invested one second to even test, to say nothing of optimizing their site for Firefox. As for PDFs I never noticed that delay (sample size of one). Weird.

Just like they, and Microsoft, and many hardware manufacturers, also know every banking password/legal document/medical data in the world. Closed operating systems, applications, drivers, can all be used to exfiltrate data unbeknownst to users, including administrators. We're forced to give them some trust, otherwise the only choice would be to use only systems, software, hardware that is completely open down to the last bit, which sadly don't exist as a whole.

This sort of ideological take is lacking necessary nuance is and ultimately thought-terminating. There’s a difference between trust and concrete proof that something is happening, and there are degrees of both. Information security is somehow a justified field despite the fact that only a very small handful of shops own the full stack. It’s all about understanding and mitigating risk.

I don't disagree in principle but let's not conflate the trust required for proprietary software with the trust required for a service that is known to exfiltrate your data.

I may have read too much science fiction, but the mere fact that someone has full access to all my data worries me, if not because we don't know anything about which form of government we would have in, say, 10 years, and how easily a corrupt government could force those businesses to surrender that data in order to find their "enemies".

BTW, I don't live under a rock, I do online banking from the PC and have pretty much given up telling my lawyer and doctor not to use Whatsapp to send and receive sensitive documents, then keep them in their unencrypted phones, but that doesn't prevent me to be worried by how easy it has become to obtain personal data about someone for those who can.

Gosh, if only there was a device vendor who didn’t do that, and offered the option for encrypted cloud backups and e2e encryption for all your inter-device traffic, and designed their privacy-sensitive services to work on anonymized tokens instead of device identifiers or user accounts…

… but apple sells ads too therefore every option is equally bad!

It’s funny to see people admit with the AI stuff that apple is getting it right, introducing privacy-protecting approaches and services, etc, yet refuse to admit that the same perspective and approaches have informed all their services for a long time. In the day to day, there is no legitimate debate that Apple Maps is vastly more privacy preserving than google maps, etc. People use some weird purity test where because App Store ads exist suddenly apple is the same as a literal adtech company.

If Apple still made a router I would buy it. But they don’t…

A new AirPort Extreme with an M Series I would be all over that though.

> Yes, I'm sure their CSAM was trained on publicly available data. They sell broken-by-design devices with decades old kernel for an exuberant price but people still fall for the stale "sEcUrItY" marketing pitch. Talk about naive.

and see, the problem is that people think this passes for a rebuttal, or even civilized discourse. You're literally the exact cliche that pops up in every discussion around privacy that I was referring to in my comment above.

It truly costs you nothing to have a little bit of civility and class. Most of us are here to discuss and not to meme about “le apple CSAM”.

I'm guessing that you're arguing about something that literally doesn't exist, to be honest. Endpoint CSAM scanning was never rolled out to consumer devices, it was a proposal from the EU (that popular savior!) that Apple successfully stalled and navigated until E2E was ready for rollout, upon which they said "lol no, that's stupid" and then the push fell apart.

Regardless though, complying with lawful authorities inside their jurisdictions is something that every corporation is gonna have to do... even in china. If the EU makes dumb decisions, it's not exactly Apple's fault. EU sovereignty cuts both ways, sometimes you get GDPR and sometimes you get mandatory nannyware. But since it didn't pass, I don't know why you'd bring it up as even an issue, let alone as being something caused by apple?

And again, to go back to the start, the fact that this vague "apple bad" argumentation is so routine and so tolerated is silly. You're mad about something that wasn't caused by apple and didn't actually happen anyway. It's vague tonal FUD and virtue-signaling to other people who are similar haters, and there's enough people who upvote/echo similar sentiments that it is self-sustaining. You can address the point without ducking out to random "but what about that one unrelated-to-apple bad-thing that almost happened that one time???" virtue-signaling points.

The ever-relevant Paul Graham: https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

Plus, their CSAM scanner used hashsets provided by a third party that is used by every other CSAM scanner, IIRC.

> … but apple sells ads too therefore every option is equally bad!

Yes.

It also doesn't help that said device vendor has been trying to destroy computing freedom while sabotaging open standards left and right.

> It’s funny to see people admit with the AI stuff that apple is getting it right, introducing privacy-protecting approaches and services, etc, yet refuse to admit that the same perspective and approaches have informed all their services for a long time.

It's funny that different people on the Internet express different and sometimes conflicting opinions?