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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Thumbs up for Apple distinguishing themselves by their pro-privacy stance, as opposed to MS, who don't have anything to win by Win10's excessive "telemetry" IMHO.

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I recently realised that any company taking on Google (e.g. Apple, Mozilla, ...) that is afraid they won't be able to take them on in areas like machine learning or sheer size, is realising, rightfully so, that being pro-privacy is the one thing they can compete on with Google that Google will never be able to imitate. Pretty sweet, actually.

I think a big thing about AI with Apple is the fact that their stance on privacy makes it a bit harder to compete with the harvested data sets of Google. From what I understand though, according to the reactions on the papers they released a bit back, they're not doing so poorly.

That being said, and I've never used Cortana or Alexa, but I hear they're pretty decent compared to Siri.

Exactly, I think they figure that if they have to harvest data themselves and try to beat Google at its own game, they have a larger chance of losing than if they concede on quality by not harvesting data (as much), but try to offset that by being privacy-conscious. And yeah, perhaps they'll still be able to do a pretty decent job that might not give them too much of a disadvantage compared to Google. You often see, I think, that with a few years delay many machine learning advancements can be reproduced offline.

Hmmm.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/isps-say-your-we...

> CTIA is the main lobbyist group representing mobile broadband providers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint.

It doesn't just represent them, Apple is also a member:

https://www.ctia.org/about/our-members

You do know that Apple makes mobile devices, right? And so it would make sense that Apple is part of the group the supports hardware standards in the mobile device industry, they're not just a lobbying group.

You mean the Walkman, right? Why yes, I heard of it, but thanks for double checking.

Anyway, If they're pro-privacy, it would also make sense for them to raise hell about the group they're part of for some other reason is arguing that browsing data shouldn't be considered private, of all things.

They're a member of the group, not its owner. We don't know what they're doing but they can't control it.

5 downvotes huh; anyone able to explain how the above is compatible with a strong pro-privacy stance? That's like saying you're a vegetarian, except for saturday noon.

Apple may be a member of CTIA, and CTIA may have argued for a particular anti-privacy stance, but that doesn't mean Apple supports that stance. There are a lot of members of CTIA, and CTIA presumably lobbies for a lot of things, not just ISP privacy rules.

May be a member? They are. And I tried looking for an statement by Apple on that issue, couldn't find one. So until I see one, I'll say the lobby group speaks for them.

Is the money that lobby groups works with organized in such a way that Apple's money doesn't go towards this particular thing? If not, what does "not supporting that stance" even mean? That they outsourced their fight for it, so that they can have the nasty outcome and stay morally pure, that as long as there is some bending over backwards possibility of Apple being against it, they're against it?

> There are a lot of members of CTIA,

Apple is a giant, not just one member among hundreds. If they are quiet on this, it has their support. Or are you saying they might not even be aware? Just didn't find it important enough to scream bloody murder about it? No matter how you try to spin it, can you spin it into something really good?

> and CTIA presumably lobbies for a lot of things, not just ISP privacy rules.

Unless you're meaning to say the also have a part of the budged for lobbying for the opposite of this effort I can only ask "yes, and?".

You're going to great lengths to argue that the tech company with the best track record for privacy is secretly trying to violate your privacy. You're wrong.

I'm not going to great lengths to $yourstrawman, certainly not in a kiddo phrasing like "is secretly trying to violate your privacy." I say what I say, in the words I use, and apparently none of you can argue with one bit of it, yet you downvote like mad regardless.

Were any of you even aware of the information? I looked at that list out of curiosity, and was surprised to see Apple. I was less surprised to see others, but Apple did surprise me. Not as surprising as the pathetic reaction here so far, but still surprising. And I don't take Apple seriously since the 1 button mouses, you know? I still believed their "privacy in our walled garden" stance, it's not like that required flattering them.

> the tech company with the best track record for privacy

I simply never bought into the premise that I have to pick among the presented turds. At that level of size and desire to be a middleman just to be a middleman, they're all trash sadly, and if you think criticizing one means bolstering the others, that's your outlook, another premise I don't share.

Are you absolutist or absolutian?

I love how this comment of course stands. Keep staying classy.

It's also a real shame they're doing this before Mozilla. Mozilla already has Tracking Protection but only for Private Windows.

It's like Mozilla can't even embrace its privacy stance fully.

Like their entire revenue stream comes from search deals, who all depend on advertising.

In fact, Mozilla is working on that: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tracking-protectio...

> We believe these additions will help us take the next step toward shipping Tracking Protection in Firefox beyond Private Browsing Mode. Look for that study in late 2017.

Not exactly the same, but there's Privacy Badger [1] from EFF that works on Firefox, Chrome and Opera. If you'd like to see a visualization of the tracking for your browsing habits, there's Lightbeam [2] from Mozilla. Both these have been around for a few years now.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

[2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/

You can enable Tracking Protection in Firefox for normal browsing windows in the settings->privacy tab

Does not appear for me. It's only for the private windows.

Oh. I am sorry. True, it doesn't appear for normal windows. Anyway, as some other user suggested, visit "about:config" and change the privacy settings there.

What key?

I didn't realize it was only activated in private windows. Now that you've made me notice I consider this misleading, on the settings page it says nothing about being private windows only.

It most certainly does say that this only applies to private windows, "Use Tracking Protection in Private Windows" [1]. If you want the always using tracking protection you can set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true in about:config or install the disconnect extension.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/settings-privacy-browsi...

Apple has every reason to do so, as their revenue doesn't come from ads. But I guess Google also has the motivation to enable this in Chrome, to make other ad networks less effective (and Google ads more effective). If it happens, what does this mean for the internet advertising business?

Internet Explorer has tracking protection since IE9.

They are completely different beasts. Internet Explorer merely offers the option to enable[1] "Do Not Track", which websites and advertisers are free to ignore[2], while Safari's new ad tracker blocker "uses machine learning to identify trackers, segregate the cross-site scripting data, put it away so now your privacy — your browsing history — is your own"[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track#Internet_Explorer...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track#Effectiveness

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-adds-a-tracker-block...

Also worth pointing out that Safari has had the 'do not track' feature for years and Twitter recently announced they are going to start ignoring it (a good example of how useless it is). So this new protection is very necessary and a great USP for Safari.

You are actually incorrect. Tracking Protection refers to an IE feature that lets you set "Tracking Protection Lists", which block traffic to specified domains and URLs. You can see a bit about them here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh273400(v=vs.85).a...

The whole "Do Not Track" default thing was, of course, a huge fiasco, as Google and others chose to ignore IE's default usage of it.

I don't know why this has been downvoted. Tracking Protection Lists are one of the best and unsung features of IE. People don't realize that they're different from Do Not Track.

Do you have to set it up manually? How is this better than downloading one of the privacy-protecting extensions available for most desktop browsers?

Arguably, the fact that you don't have to trust a random third party extension code is a perk. And since this is a pretty straight up text file format it works off of, it's easy to roll your own or customize it as you wish.

As I said in one of my comments, it's a bit janky to set up because you have to select one of the Tracking Protection Lists from their add-on gallery to turn it on, there's no default list pre-selected.

Going to my IE right now to activate it, I have to say this is a janky solution. It opens the Add-ons window, where you can see you have no Tracking Protection Lists. Then you can click to browse the add-on gallery for them, and then you have to scroll down and pick a list from a set of options.

While this is flexible, open, and that's all good, the lack of a common sense default and a multi-step setup process is probably why like... even I am not using this right now.

If Apple does this by default, it's gonna make a huge dent in Google Analytics' numbers, whereas probably almost nobody uses the feature in IE.

If you're interested, I created and maintain a tracking protection list based on the Ghostery and Disconnect filter lists. It's concise, fast, and better than anything in the IE gallery. https://amtopel.github.io/tpl/

IE isn't really a browser I use heavily personally. Has Microsoft carried the feature forward to Edge, or are they relying on extensions from the Store for that?

They discontinued it in Edge, unfortunately.

But you can install extensions like ghostery that so the same things in edge

But you shouldn't have to install extensions to do this..

"it's gonna make a huge dent in Google Analytics' numbers".

Very unlikely, since almost nobody uses desktop Safari.

This feature will surely show up in iOS Safari, which would have a big impact.

It's already in iOS 11 beta: https://twitter.com/webkit/status/871834286286139392

Lol.

It’s obviously not true that nobody uses Safari on Apple’s laptops and desktops.

Apple’s Mac sales have doubled since 2008 and is in the top 5 when it comes to PC shipments: http://www.asymco.com/2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintos...

Shipping ~30 million Macs a year certainly isn't almost nobody.

He isn't talking about the number of macs sold though. Market share of Desktop Safari according to NetMarketShare [0] in May 2017 was 3.56%.

[0] : https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...

Web advertising is such a cutthroat and low margin business that having 2–3% of all browser users become untrackable is a big deal.

Safari on iOS obviously has significantly higher market share on mobile and the intelligent tracker blocking is part of iOS 11 beta.

Yes, it will be a big deal when it comes to mobile.

Most sites don't obey the do not track header. Edge on the other hand is much more nefarious, by default it sends all data sent by POST requests to Microsoft. I was surprised to find Bing sending data from people who use Edge on my site to try and improve their search results. There are so many security and privacy issues with this it's not funny at all.

I've never heard that Edge sends absolutely all POST requests to any website to Microsoft as well. Could you share an article or something proving this?

You're joking right? Factory reset your iPhone sometime and note all of the prompts to share and access your data. The only difference between MS and Apple is that Microsoft made the mistake of presenting everything all on one screen instead of breaking it up over 5 or 10 prompts as you use the device.

There's a huge difference between being asked if it's ok to share your data and just sharing it by default. Additionally, Apple doesn't offer any kind of way for anyone but you to decrypt your data.

I think he’s referring to aggregated anonymized usage data, which people can opt in or out of with no effect on function. (This is different than messages, etc., which are stored on Apple’s servers but end-to-end encrypted.)

I know he is, but that's not the same thing as what he's implying and, even then, Apple's solution is opt-in while Microsoft's was on by default.

If Apples solution is opt-in, Microsofts is in. For many things there just is no opting out.

How can you say that when Windows 10 had Cortana turned on by default? Siri is not enabled by default on a Mac (just like all the other services) and you have to purposely choose to have them turned on during install.

I'm pretty sure I was asked to opt in to Cortana during install. During the setup phase so it may be true of OEMs as well.

What are you talking about, you can't turn it off

Sure you can, during setup or any time afterward since day one. It's even easier in the Creator's update.

Messages are not currently stored on Apple servers unless you enable iCloud backup.

As of today they will be! And synced across devices.

Hooray.

(still encrypted)

So you've never actually installed Windows 10 then? Because from the beginning it's asked for permission to share your data for things like Cortona, the touch keyboard, ink, voice, etc. Based on user response they've evolved the interface and made it clearer removing anti-patterns.

This is the same stuff Apple asks for permissions on.

Microsoft doesn't let you turn off telemetry data entirely. Things like hardware configurations and installed drivers are still send, albeit anonymously so that Microsoft can better support the OS.

Again Apple does something similar. Spotlight and Safari send data back to Apple even when you're making queries against other services (e.g. DuckDuckGo Searches). And like Microsoft, there's no UI to disabled it.

Yes, I have. I installed it 2 weeks before it was released to the public as part of the Windows Insider program and then again on several machines after release and, most recently, in the Creator's Update. Until there was a huge backlash against MS, all of those things were opt-out and turned on by default, including Cortana and the ink features. Apple does not turn any of these on by default, nor have they ever, and you have to opt-in to those features to use them.

Spotlight and Safari send anonymous data back that is parsed and separated so that it can't be used to identify the machine, user, or account that they came from. That's wildly different from the MS approach even after all the changes made on MS's end.

You're right that it's opt-out with Microsoft and opt-in with Apple. However Microsoft's opt-out screen appears during setup before you ever even reach the desktop. Where as Apple's opt-in is a nag that occurs periodically as you use the device or anytime you install an update.

I understand that Apple has publicly disclosed how they anonymize data and roll identifiers but Microsoft hasn't so you really can't say if telemetry data can be tied back to a user or not because you don't know.

Apple's opt-in is only triggered when you attempt to use a feature that relies on a function of the opt-in or when a new OS feature utilizes those functions. It's not a nag. It doesn't ask you until you want to use it. Microsoft assumes you want to use it and hides the opt-out settings under an "Advanced" button during setup when it asks about new features and then promptly asks you again after it assumes that you don't know what you're doing. The "Are you sure?" prompts on Windows are far more egregious.

But that's basically spotlight so it's a difference with little meaning IMO.

You can turn off spotlight and safari and siri suggestions and there should be no traffic to Apple after that.

Yes, Microsoft has a long history of providing user privacy and control settings and then ignoring or reverting them.

Absolutely and so does everyone else. Google is great at asking/nagging you to turn features back on that you've turned off in Android. And every time you update iOS, if you have Location Services or some other feature like iCloud turned off then you get nagged to turn them back on.

I thought I had read that there were ways to shut off all the MS telemetry via hidden settings or registry changes.

Cortana can also be disabled by quickly deleting or renaming a file somewhere, after killing a process. Specifics can be googled.

There are ways to disable all of the various data collection mechanisms but they aren't sanctioned by Microsoft and MS provides no user interface for them. There are several projects on Github that perform varying degrees of this.

The same goes for Apple's collection mechanisms.

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