Finally, I feel a corporation is using ML to project me, rather than sell me.
Safari for Windows is long gone if that's what you were thinking.
One of my coworkers once told me he preferred Apple products over any other vendor if only because he believes that by paying higher for apple products, he is paying for the privacy/security aspects of having his data secure and personal. I'm not sure how much this is true, but this datapoint does seem to confirm that theory.
For example: http://imgur.com/a/tBDrt
These are pre-login connections, and with the exception of Flux and Citrix Receiver, all the processes belongs to Apple. Why do they have to connect at all?
• captiveagent detects when you're on a captive-portal network, it does this by checking for known-content domains apple controls
• helpd is the daemon that connects to Apple's online help docs
• locationd powers location services
And so on. These are all easy to google. Come _on._ >:[
> Does anyone know what the nbagent process is?
> ...
> It appears to be something related to Software Update and/or the Mac App Store, so allowing it seems safe. I'd speculate that it showed up in the latest OS X update since I'd never seen it before today either, and the first google hits seem to appear only very recently.
Sorry, while honest good effort, that's not acceptable answer. And that's before we start investigating processes that do connect AFTER login - what the heck is "systemmigrationd"? (try googling that).
Sorry, but macOS regarding privacy is almost as bad, as Windows. It has many processes that connect somewhere, it is uncertain what these processes do, etc. How can someone even audit that?
Compare to CentOS/Fedora, where the only hit to internet during pre-login is either DNS or your configuration and all the other hits are user-initiated (except browsers, which do update their certification revocation list, unsafe-urls list, etc).
So how does an Apple computer manage to do the following, without contacting Apple servers:
iCloud, iMessage, Apple software updates, Apple store?
Which of these are diagnostic (I said no to that dialog box on install) or iCloud syncing (which I don't use)?
Google’s business model is to digitise you and own that digital copy. They use this proxy of you to manipulate and exploit your behaviour for profit and to indirectly rent access to aspects of you to their customers (currently, advertisers).
Apple’s business model, on the other hand, is to make great tools and sell them to you at a price that makes them happy.
(So if you were to buy an Android phone and never use it, Google would be very unhappy. If you buy an Apple phone and never use it, Apple’s still made their profit.)
To cut a long story short, privacy is an absolute competitive advantage for Apple. It is a thing that they can compete on without breaking a sweat (as it doesn’t impact their bottom line negatively) whereas, if Google was to try, they would go bankrupt (as their business model depends on profiling you and violating your privacy).
All you need to understand to grok why Apple is protecting your privacy is that multibillion-dollar corporations don’t get an absolute competitive advantage over their main rivals everyday and – if you do find one – you’d have to be an absolute idiot to squander it. (And I don’t believe the folks at Apple are idiots.)
So yes, Apple’s systems are proprietary and closed, and no, you don’t have to love everything they do, but when it comes to protecting your privacy, all you need to do is trust that under our current system of capitalism, a publicly-traded corporation won’t act against the interests of its bottom line/the interests of their shareholders to squander an absolute competitive advantage against its main rival.
(PS. Longer term, I hope that we will radically alter the topology of technology so that we are not reliant on a handful of kings – benevolent or otherwise – to safeguard our rights. That’s what the Internet of People initiative we just launched with DiEM25 in Europe is all about: https://ar.al/notes/towards-an-internet-of-people-with-diem2...)
*We're going to ignore the minuscule hackintosh community for a minute.
That's the way it should be everywhere. Or, at the very least, there should be a visible user preference for it.