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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, this feels like a case of "you're going to have to let the plumber into your house if you want him to fix your broken toilet." If you're buying Apple products and asking for support from them, you're implicitly trusting them anyway. Apple likes to advertise their security greatly; but in fact, I think "we own you so you can be protected from everyone, including yourself" is probably closer to the truth.

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There's a difference between trusting Apple as a company and trusting random Apple retail employees. A rogue admin could try to extract user data from servers, but I expect Apple has at least some processes in place to prevent that. A rogue programmer could try to get malicious code shipping in an Apple OS or on their servers, but that would be risky and easy to get caught doing. On the other hand, a rogue retail employee given an unlocked phone would 'just' need to surreptitiously tap around a bit to copy data off. And they're paid a lot less anyway, which matters if your threat model isn't the NSA but random criminality.

Following the plumber metaphor, at least we were able to monitor plumber's action and it affects mostly the toilet. While what apple is doing is more along the line of "give us the key to your house, we will fix your toilet"

People put plumbers/babysitters/cooks/helpers/professionals of various kinds in their houses that they don't monitor.

Plumbers (reputable ones, anyway) are generally bonded and insured so that customers know they will do what they say they will do without causing undue damage (see https://www.angieslist.com/articles/hiring-contractor-whats-...).

Does Apple provide any insurance to protect/reimburse the customer if a Genius misuses their access to the customer's device?

The plumber analogy is a bit silly, as it is not access to the hardware of your phone that the author is objecting to (which would be analogous to your home), its the confidential private information that is stored on it. The issue is not that you think the Apple store employee will steal the 128G of flash memory from the hardware of your phone, it is that he will copy credit card or other personal information from your phone. The assumption here is that having access to an unlocked phone gives access to these things.

Yes people do give service professionals access to there homes, but unless they are hopelessly naive they don't leave credit cards, money, jewellery and guns around.

If you read the fine print in the agreements you make to have such items you explicitly agree not to allow other people access to them.

The scary thing is that responses here don't seem to be playing the devils advocate and actually seem to be believing this is OK.

Yeah, I don't get it either. It seems like a weird thing to choose to complain about. Especially because there are conceivably lots of potential things wrong with a phone that would require being able to log in, or for which being logged in would make diagnostics a lot easier.

Bring the diagnostic machine out front?

And how would you know whether that machine is really doing what it or its operator is telling you it's doing?

Ultimately, it is an issue of trust; and I argue that the relationship of trust with Apple started the moment you decided to buy an iPhone, and continues to apply when you ask Apple for support.

Apple should be a good citizen and copy your selfies off your phone in front of you instead of taking it in the back.

Or you could always just click on "Backup", erase your phone, and restore it after you get it back. Apple has had iCloud backup since 2011. Its had tethered computer backup since day 1.

> If you're buying Apple products and asking for support from them, you're implicitly trusting them anyway.

Trust is not binary or one-dimensional. You have no choice[1] but to place some hope in them working in alignment with your interests when the build the product, but it doesn't mean you should be careless about retaining some control in the process when doing business with their retail staff. Their staff is human and heterogenous, and you know there are more levels of QA in the phone production process than in the customer service, and customer service employees have much lower risks of getting caught & much less to lose career-wise than iOS engineers if they violate your privacy.

People complain about Facebook and Windows 10 too. "You're implicitly trusting Facebook/Microsoft anyway" is not really true there either, you're just tolerating their privacy behaviour in exchange for value, and hoping to escpe harm.

[1] If you want a smartphone, that is (the competition is worse)

And he's backing up the phone to iCloud anyway.

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