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Comment by exodust | Hacker News Reader

There's a certain hypocrisy I'm noticing in these forum discussions whereby many of you are distrusting the FBI, but apparently you're fine with Apple having the best chance of cracking your phone.

Everyone is going on about encryption, but notice it's not just encryption that protects us, but also vendor-controlled measures such as self-destruct.

I prefer a level playing field in these matters. I don't want the FBI to have a better chance at cracking my phone than anyone else, but I also don't want Apple to have the best chance either.

It's all or nothing. My vote is for strong encryption, but up until that point, everything else should be on the table for all parties such as crime investigators, not just exclusively controlled by tech giants.

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The hypocrisy is only superficial. It seems at first thought that the government (being owned by the people) would be more trustworthy. But...

Based on incentives, the government is incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible. Apple is incentivized to make people's phone/laptop experience as good as possible.

Based on worst-case actions, Apple can use your data to 1) sell you more devices, 2) generally reduce your consumer purchasing power, or unlikely 3) sell/share your data and seriously compromise your privacy. The government, on the other hand, can throw you in jail, for life.

Based on history (Germany, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, ...), governments have demonstrated real threats with user data in hand that corporations have never really come close to competing with.

Your idea that Apple are incentivized to make people's phone experience as good as possible sounds like a wishful proposition. There's plenty of examples of Apple features and restriction designed as eco-system lock-in, behavior manipulation, or control limiting for commercial reasons. "What's good for Apple is good for our customers" is what they want you to believe, but as a long time iOS device owner, I reject that on numerous grounds.

There's also an equivalence flaw in your argument that sounds like it's coming straight from infowars.com: "the government is incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible".

I'm with your on incentives though. And one thing Apple have no commercial interest or incentive for, is fighting crime.

We don't live in Star Wars. There's more than dark vs light. My position doesn't mean I am not aware of western government corruption, bungling, even war crimes. But I am not permanently polarized, forever holding "the government" in contempt for misguided actions and evil intentions.

On history... if we're talking tyrannical governments, then "protection of user data" I suggest would not have stopped any given government in your examples from unleashing hell on its people one way or another.

Well I think my main point was just to say that the "hypocrisy" you mention actually has a rational backing. Not that the backing is bulletproof, but it's certainly more than a hypocrisy.

You seem to most strongly disagree with the assertion that "the government is incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible". It's pretty clear from my original comment that "the government" is referring to law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI. Note that the FBI has thousands of agents whose performance is measured ultimately by the percent of cases they close. Thus, the claim that FBI agents "are incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible" is more an observation than some crackpot theory. It doesn't mean that we should change that - running a law enforcement agency any other way wouldn't make much sense. But it does provide the rational backing for someone to be more concerned about worst-case government abuse of data than worst-case corporate abuse.

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