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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

Disagree strongly. Apple pays a serious price for their privacy stance, which they would rather not pay. Doing machine learning on-device makes it less effective. Apple's directions aren't as good as they could be because Maps randomly segments trips and masks its users identity. Apple's App Store revenues are lower because they limit how apps can identify users.

This difference is deeper than business models. Compare Google's Hands Free with Apple Pay for example: the same business model (collecting interchange fees) but Apple's approach preserves user's privacy at the cost of some convenience, while Google's is arguably more convenient but informs both Google and the merchant as soon as you enter into the store.

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There are further examples that Apple takes privacy seriously: 1) end-to-end encryption of all iMessages 2) encrypted iCloud content 3) making password management accessible to a lot of people who would not pursue it otherwise (with Keychain) 4) attempting MAC address randomization to prevent WiFi tracking, though from this paper [1] it appears to be broken.

Having worked there for a time, in my opinion privacy is deeply ingrained in the company culture. Much easier solutions are avoided if they sacrifice the customer's privacy. Further, it seems many of the decisions are made to minimize the amount of information required at each step to the absolute essentials. These concerns permeate internal technical discussions -- it is not just marketing materials.

They also have pretty extensive privacy materials on their website [2, 3]. While that may not be useful to the HN crowd, hopefully it makes privacy more accessible to some segment of their customers who actually read it.

References: [1] PDF warning: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.02874.pdf [2] https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/ [3] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Apple Genius just asked me for my username and password to my MacBook so he could type it into some service form for repairs. I don't think asking for that info is really compatible with "we care about privacy"

There are a lot of things that employees in the retail stores do that isn't very "Apple". I suspect that's partially from not having as strong culture fit selection in hiring, partially from lack of understanding (when it comes to security, it's a nuanced subject) and partially from the realities of being productive in a retail environment.

the form was an official Apple form for repairs. they are going to replace my keyboard and screen. they said they needed the password to test. I asked why not just boot from a USB drive and they said they could not do that. I didn't ask why they couldnt just swap a drive for testing.

they didn't offer this option I had to suggest it but basically I'll have to reformat the drive before taking it in for service.

Create a separate account for them, and make sure you have FileVault turned on so your home folder is encrypted.

I've managed to get this concept across to authorised repairers who don't speak english (and I don't speak Thai).

Exactly. Or just enable the guest account. That's what I always do.

I assume they might want admin permissions honestly.

Having said that, prior to my recent visit (failing mbp fan) my trips had always been for failing/failed discrete graphics (about 5 trips on 2 different generations of 17" mbp) so a reinstall is inevitable because making macOS work properly after a mainboard replacemnt is more work than reinstalling from scratch

It so easy to get admin rights on a Mac anyway.

- Boot into single user mode...

# mount -uw /

# rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

# reboot

Reboot the machine and it walks you through a re-run of setting up the OS X set up assistant, which allows creation of an admin account.

I hate to break it to you, but unless you store your home folder on a separate encrypted partition (which would be really inconvenient), this won't work.

FileVault 2 encrypts your entire boot volume, so there's no separate encryption of your home folder going on. If you give someone any of the passwords that unlock the boot volume, they could get all of the data off it (by using target disk mode or booting to single user mode, etc.)

whats the point of having branded stores then?

Store? I think you mean Apple Town Square.

Can't wait until they build this into the auto-correction...

Well I guess the debate is settled then.

It seems like they didn't want to add a backdoor to the OS just for the sake of repairs.

Yes, the front door will do fine /s

Literally that. I think the policy is that users should set up a seperate admin account.

You should email Tim Cook (tcook@apple.com), and see what he says about that.

That’s why you encrypt _your_ user account and add a “service account” for the Geniuses.

They asked me for this as well and said it was for diagnostics to confirm the repair was a success. You can decline politely with no problems.

It is a feature of privacy that he cannot login without you giving that information.

You need to change it now.

> Doing machine learning on-device makes it less effective.

Doing it on-device has other advantages besides privacy (e.g. it works without an Internet connection).

> Apple's directions aren't as good as they could be because Maps randomly segments trips and masks its users identity.

Could you explain that? I didn't really understand what you mean by segmenting the trips and why that should masks the user identity.

> Apple's App Store revenues are lower because they limit how apps can identify users.

You're comparing them to Google here. One could ask why apps can identify their users at all?

Two options for data queries being passed around and saved:

A trip from your house to the sex doll shop

vs.

A trip from your house to the busy thoroughfare a mile away + trip from busy thoroughfare to the next town over + trip from next town to sex doll shop

Not to mention map lookups are done via a periodically regenerated random identifier - not linked to an actual account or device id.

When you compare anything to google, it will look as if caring for privacy.

Google is the hugest ad network based on gobbling all privacy from everywhere while Apple is an overpriced hardware seller, of course it will do better on privacy than google. But this does not make apple a privacy oriented company.

The fact that you view it as expensive does not make it overpriced. Apple certainly has no trouble selling at their prices.

no problem selling to a minority of users worldwide. The rest simply enjoy PCs and other options and ignore Apple.

So what? Are you claiming that all luxury products are overpriced because most people can't afford them?

The thing is. Both the Suface Pro and Pixel(shining examples of companies not quite being Apple) have sold at exactly the same price as their Apple counterparts for the past few years.

And neither product (I used both) compares to a Mac. There is an elegant simplicity in using a Mac that isn't there when using a PC or other.

Having been a *nix admin for a hair under 20 years, I prefer only Free & OpenBSD to macOS.

Overpriced? Not if they are selling products at te price offered. If they were OVER priced, they would sell zero. If a good is above the price people are willing to pay, they will sell zero. Clearly, that is not the case. An economic nitpick to be sure but factual. They are correctly priced given their sales and profitability numbers.

No, you can have at least one customer even it is overpriced (e. g. if Apple sold the iPhone X for $10,000, it's very like that still at least one person buys it, it definitely would be overpriced though).

It's overpriced if you could make more revenue by lowering the price.

> and profitability numbers

I was referring to the "Not if they are selling products at te price offered. If they were OVER priced, they would sell zero. If a good is above the price people are willing to pay, they will sell zero. Clearly, that is not the case. An economic nitpick to be sure but factual." part, not arguing about Apple's case.

What’s a useful definition of “privacy oriented company” in your mind?

To me, it’s: “a company whose profit incentives are aligned with their user’s privacy.”

You can go on and on about whether they’re “truly” privacy-oriented but to me that’s a meaningless distinction; a company’s profit incentives are the very definition of what they’re “oriented” towards.

> Apple's App Store revenues are lower because they limit how apps can identify users.

I think this is less about privacy and more about control. Only Apple apps are allowed to track Apple users.

But Apple chooses to implement things in ways that make it way harder for them to do this. Eg Touch ID and facial recognition on the device only, not in the cloud.

That's because of the horrible press they'd get if you couldn't unlock your phone without cell service, or if it took ten seconds when the network was spotty.

Fingerprints and data for face unlock aren't stored in the cloud on Android either. Wouldn't make any sense anyway since I surely want to unlock my phone without Internet access.

Yes, but having a different device recognise you or having the algorithm get better faster would be nice.

We must remind ourselves that Apple is a closed social network based on hardware whereas lets say FB is software. So Apple plan to monetize this walled hardware/software garden for its own needs

What are you talking about?

Can Apple phones only call or text other Apple phones? Where is the 'buddy list'/graph/contact database that can't be easily ported to another social network?

Apple's just worse than Google at building these kind of heavily data driven web applications, which they've chosen to paper over to the public with a strong stance on privacy. It's a smart business move.

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