Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxpert | Hacker News Reader

Have used Android for years (I have been using devices like Pro, rooted, custom ROMS, skins whatever you might imagine). Shifted to Apple's echo system 2-3 years ago. It took me some time to get used to iOS but integration across devices (my mac, my iPad, my watch) is simply amazing. I am not going sound like broken record or fan boy here. Apple got me on this video where Steve Jobs really showed how much they care for privacy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo the other day my wife got a notification from Google Photos that it prepared our Album from our trip to SFO. We have turned of location tagging and everything, turns out Google is not content with me asking them to leave me alone, they would use ML and whatever they have built to figure out where I have been. In this day in age, while Apple might sound outdated to a lot of people, nothing can beat the sense of security with privacy Apple carries with itself now.

View on HN

> nothing can beat the sense of security with privacy Apple carries with itself now.

That is exactly it. Apple is not good at privacy, they are good at giving you the sense of it. A closed source OS, on proprietary hardware, where they don't even give you root access to your own device, will never be private. You pay them, but really they own the phone and you have to trust them.

But they are obviously very good at making you /feel/ secure and private.

As opposed to what "open source OS" on what "open source hardware"?

My comment wasn't meant to compare it to anything else. Their nice words just don't convince me on a technical level and I'm surprised that so many people here appear to fully trust them. If their phones were perfectly secure there would be no debate if they are willing unlock the phone for any agency or not. It would simply not be possible and there would exist no security company that is able to do so.

> If their phones were perfectly secure there would be no debate if they are willing unlock the phone for any agency or not.

Total security is not possible, not at least by a long shot.

Although, I understand your concern about why people trust these companies. While I don't know the answer just yet, I think one reason is that most these companies are located in Western countries where "rule of law" is considered extremely crucial. Openness about balance-sheets, government policies, and privacy are - to the best of my knowledge - critical in the US.

Take my Sony Xperia phone. Is Android Open Source? I think it isn't. Is the hardware proprietary? OK I can root the phone probably, but then what? How can I trust the new ROM if I can't really know what's inside? Google wants to make me feel secure, so they do their best to provide tools to protect my phone and account.

Now tell me what serious alternative there is for a modern smartphone? Firefox and Ubuntu have abondoned their phone OS, and they had no good working system that could compete with Android or iOS? Windows Phone? How's that better than Apple's offering?

Apple seems to have the best arguments here.

Android is not FLOSS obviously but the point is that you can 't do more than having blind trust for the manufacturer. Having the best argument is not the same as as actually offering the best privacy.

You could try jolla or fairphone or even a blackphone (or one of the governmental only privacy oriented smartphones not available to the general public).

But this is somewhat irrelevant as having a smartphone with a GSM chip is a severe privacy issue in itself whatever the hardware/OS. Even a simple mobile phone is a privacy liability unless you take some precautionary measures.

To get some privacy one has to accept to have less comfort and ease of use, privacy and security are a tradeoff. something only a few actually do.

Android is actually FLOSS. The problem comes when people want to add a Google account.

You can use a free version of Android? Yeah! You are going to lack some stuff tho. Google Play Services provides geolocation services, the app store, push notifications,...

I don’t think it stops with the Google software. You will still more likely than not have proprietary binary blobs running in your kernel to support your proprietary hardware executing proprietary firmware that is as large as operating systems themselves, the largest with the biggest attack surface waiting the process anything they can on 2G, 3G, 4G, WiFi and Bluetooth bands.

Android is more open than iOS but it’s not really open enough to make a significant difference, not for 99% of users and not really for the 1% that think it is more secure or private because they run a (heavily modified, very old, probably abandoned by the manufacturer) Linux kernel but ignore the baseband and closed source camera driver.

I think you're confusing android and android open source project (AOSP) here. Android is AOSP + Gapps.

Even the FLOSS nature of AOSP has been questioned for years, but as a manufacturer it's impossible to offer a phone with AOSP, to be able to use android you have to include the Gapps.

Google has slowly been moving functional parts from AOSP to Gapps, the point being to limit the AOSP part and eventually get rid it of the open source part.

You don't need GApps to run Android. The only closed source blob you need is chipset and modem drivers.

And no: AOSP is Android. It's like saying that Linux is not Linux unless you bundle it with GNU-utils and wrapped by Canonical.

I don't think privacy can be measured by counting the number of lines of code that are open source.

A device can be perfectly respectful of your privacy despite being closed and proprietary.

The only difference (IMO) between open and closed platform is that with the former you can have 3rd parties inspect it.

However, unless you have the resources to fully audit an open platform (either yourself, or by paying someone else) I believe you should assume the worst from both open and proprietary platforms.

While it sounds intuitively correct that both open and closed platforms can be malicious, it is justified to a priori distrust a closed system significantly more than then an open one, because opportunity makes the thief.

Even if it actually is, there is no way to know if a closed and proprietary is respectful of your privacy. It is a matter of blind trust.

Which does not mean that open source is synonymous of privacy either, only that one can go further than blind trust to the manufacturer.

There's more than the device code. They're not going to open source their entire web infrastructure. They DO store your data, somewhere. Either way, you need trust.

Exactly!

As another example, Telegram claims to be the most secure messaging app out there. They have open-sourced their code, but what really matters is what they do with peoples' data on their servers.

> They're not going to open source their entire web infrastructure.

I think blockchain can actually solve this problem once and for all. When data is stored in decentralized nodes, much of these concerns are gone.

That's going one step further but you're right those computer phone are made so the user will have some of its remotely stored.

Personally I do not trust them and for this reason I have no data plan and no internet on my phone.

You do not neeed blind trust. Download the firmware and reverse engineer any aspect you are concerned about, problem solved.

I think we are confusing two different but related terms in these comments.

1. Privacy of information

2. Freedom to inspect, modify and change source code.

So Open != automatic privacy of information.

The question then really boils down to do you trust apple to be doing what they say they are doing? Or would you prefer to verify it yourself? (open source)

I think Apple is betting that point 1 is much more important than point 2. More people also care about it. Hence the strategy.

Actually the more I think about it the more i realize this may be apples master stroke strategy. Google, Facebook etc. business models are primarily based around monetizing your personal data. Where as apple is saying you can have the same level of services but with out having to compromise as much of your data.

Few other points which may be obvious but non the less.

Apple is actually uniquely positioned for this strategy, since the do not need to sell your data to companies. They make their money of the devices.

It's probably one of the reasons google has been moving to more and more devices. To neutralize the Apple threat.

> Apple is not good at privacy, they are good at giving you the sense of it.

Nothing in your reply counters Apple being good at privacy. Source availability is related to privacy in your own personal opinion.

If you would like to audit each line of source code your phone will run, that is fine, most do not. Personally I like to have it both ways by regularly cracking open various components of iOS in a disassembled (ARM assembly is just as good as source code to some folks).

Which consumer electronics company is good at privacy?

The only way for Android to be any better is to basically cripple it and make it incapable of running the vast majority of apps. So Apple might not be perfect on this, but it's basically as good as you're going to get without huge compromises imo

This is simply an example of Google actually providing you with a service in exchange for the information you give them. If your iPhone photos include the same information but they don't give you a (admittedly mediocre, I've never saved one) album which uses that data in exchange, you're not maintaining any more "privacy." You're just not being made aware of how little privacy you have when syncing to a cloud-based service.

The Photos app on my iPhone does geotagging and creates relevant albums of trips away.

Yup! But what’s cool is the iPhone does all of that locally on the phone instead of on the cloud.

And it does not allow any app to export it once you archive your photos - oh, except for iCloud which is a super-expensive pay-to-play service beyond the first few photos.

Super-expensive? It’s $10/mo for a 2TB plan, which is less than the 1TB plans from both Google and Dropbox!

Know that since three months it isn't expensive anymore, but it launched over 6 years ago. So it was 5 years and 9 months expensive, since 3 months it's not expensive.

BUT, there is no 500 gb plan. So everyone who wants more than 200 gb is paying for 2TB.

They are earning more, just in a smarter way

I have 33,000 photos and it's happily under 200GB, which I pay £2.49/mo for.

You can store any kind of files on iCloud or only photos/video?

any

Not the parent, but I think the mentality that the user is wrong and misunderstands their (intentionally limited by Google) options with regard to privacy is why people move away from their ecosystem.

Try integration across devices that are not apple's and you'll understand that apple is a hardware seller and this marketing scheme is to push you into buying their devices and keep you locked in as long as possible.

The difference with other big players such as facebook or google is that google business is selling ads based on giving software for gratis and facebook business is being the parasitic middleman between people and their data / online interactions (also company) and scrambling to make the investor story time lie believable as long as possible. They both indulge in strong vendor lock-in.

My point is that apple is not in this to protect your privacy or to defend humanist values but to get more people to buy their hardware for increased profit and shareholders.

Why do you care about the motivation when the outcome is aligned with your preferences (i.e. your privacy being respected)?

It is a tell that it only appears to be aligned and actually is not. (Among my preferences is to not buy/use apple devices for a variety of reason: overpriced, battery life, short life expectency, lack of control and vendor lock-in, having to unlearn 3 decades of muscle memory, etc.)

Where there is vendor lock-in there is no possibility for freedom and freedom requires privacy. Apple has a long history of being the king of vendor lock-in.

My understanding is that apple does not protect privacy, it merely does not disregard it as effectively as the other big players because apple is different in the sense that its business is selling hardware.

Just look at what the posted page actually says: it presents touch id as secure despite being repeatedly shown otherwise, it pretends a complex passcode is secure but it will not protect your privacy when someone is asking you the code with a hammer. It phrases things in a way to induce the reader into thinking apple does not gather data about users: "Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." which actually means Apple gather your personal information to exploit themselves and to give away or trade with third parties. And so on...

Being better than the worst does not mean it's good enough.

Could you explain the vendor lock-in? The only-one I experienced is a rather soft-one, where I use an Apple device simply because it's more pleasant or practical over the alternatives. All music I had in iTunes is now moved into Plex, so no lock-in there, Apple even pushed for DRM-free music.

It has been self evident for so many years that now that you ask I don't know what to say. Vendor lock-in is so ingrained that it actually defines Apple.

Here are a few examples: try making a backup of your iphone without icloud or itunes (or manual update of iOS, or restoration) try sending GPS coordinates to a non iphone try exporting your contacts to a non iphone When apple finally offered DRM-free music on the itunes music store but refused to licensed their ALAC lossless codec preventing the music to be listened on other devices until it was reverse engineered[1] try installing software on an iphone without using the app store and jailbreaking the iphone jailbreaking is actually made to remove the limitations imposed by apple to its customers integration only works with other apple products

the list goes on

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Accusa...

I've seen real vendor lock-in on corporate level, where in the worst case, the vendor of a client suddenly just did an x20 of the licensing price for the next year, for something that was already a very expensive contract. The client had no other choice but to pay up, moving to another solution would cost many times that cost.

There is nothing Apple does that even remotely resembles such practices. I want to buy an Android? It'll take some time to migrate stuff, but I've done that before, it's not that hard, just time-consuming. It won't cost me multiple times the cost of buying another phone, and I won't lose any data.

> try making a backup of your iphone without icloud or itunes

Is offering a way to backup a device lock-in? It's the same as "oh no you have to use pg_dump to export a postgres database". Also, there are 3rd party apps you can use to backup your phone. And if you make local un-encrypted backups with iTunes, there are many tools to extract stuff like your messages history, and if you really need to - you can just find the right file, fire up sqlite and browse/recover them that way.

> try sending GPS coordinates to a non iphone

Whatsapp can do that, Google hangouts too - there's nothing stopping an app from doing that? What's your point? That you can't send an iMessage to a non-iOS device? I suggest you have a good look at all the alternatives, which can be installed without a problem on an iOS device btw.

> try exporting your contacts to a non iphone

I've done this on multiple occasions. I've had a harder time exporting contacts from Google than from iCloud/iOS devices. Apple simply uses the vCard standard.

The App store would be a vendor lock-in if I could only install Apple made software from it, which is not the case. I use many competing services and apps on my Apple devices.

And yes, ALAC was a problem for a while, but they did release the en/decoder source code under apache2 license in 2011. There are other things that smell a lot more like vendor lock-in: Siri and the maps integration in iOS, but again, that's more an inconvenience than a real hard lock-in.

Exactly. I'm totally fine with economic incentives aligning with improved privacy and security, which is exactly Apple's business model. Apple has made security and privacy "easy" to the end-user, which is no easy feat.

Apple is not a charity and nobody thinks of them as such. For example, the "RED" campaign is an effort to sell THINGS, but it also gives money to charity. Seems win-win to me.

You're right that Apple services don't integrate as nicely across non-Apple platforms. (Isn't that true of many things?)

However, to dismiss it as a marketing scheme is somewhat disingenuous. It may achieve that, but there are plenty of people out there who simply think they make the nicest hardware. The tight integration is icing on the cake. I own almost entirely Apple hardware. If I thought something else was nicer, I'd get it. I don't.

Why do you expect FOR PROFIT corporations to behave like charities or non-profits?

It's telling how you describe Google in comparison; Google is "giving software for gratis" and Facebook is "parasitic." Google is no different than Facebook: using the person as the product to sell advertisements.

I made a full circle. First, I was in love with iDevices. Then I was more and more uspet by their limitations - notably inability to directly copy content (music, videos, e-books) to and from as I wished. Mind you, these were the times that in order to even start using the phone you needed a computer with iTunes installed! So I switched to Android, only to discover you need to handle over so much data to Google you have a feeling they know more about you than you do. In the end I realized Android is just a data collection platform. I switched back to Apple, even though I still use some Google services (like Maps).

If you take the time, but you need to be computer affine, you can setup your Android device to use non Google related services. This is hard work, you need to know about the implications of using one application or another and you have the feeling that Google is trying in every single dialog box to force you enabling data tracking options with dark patterns (like enabling location reporting).

You can use Android without Google. It's easy with LineageOS.

It's not. Unless you buy a specific devices LineageOS offers good support for, and even then it's only the start.

There are a lot of devices that are supported by LineageOS. I lately bought one for a family member and the search did not take long.

I'm not saying it is hard to buy a device supported by lineageOS, I'm saying that other than buying a device for this purpose chances are your actual device or the device you had plans to buy are not supported.

This happened to me enough times that I do not even bother looking up compatibility and consider lineageOS as not an option to save myself time.

To put things in context, this discussion started because dvfjsdhgfv said they bought another device because of bad privacy on Android with Google. This means getting rid of Google was already a deciding factor when shopping for a device.

> the device you had plans to buy are not supported

Because of said context, one simply wouldn't have the plan to buy that device.

Checking for support is only a click away:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Interesting you say that. Android actually gives you control over security and privacy by telling you what your app API's get access to. iOS apps could be transmitting details back to home without your knowledge.

Wouldn't Google be in the same position? They could grant their apps privileges without your knowledge. They build the OS.

Oh sure, but google has everything to lose for leaking personal data. Rogue app companies simply have nothing to lose

> Android actually gives you control over security and privacy by telling you what your app API's get access to.

Simply mentioning a laundry list of the myriad things an app will be permitted to do is NOT giving me control over security and privacy.

http://cdn.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/03-Angry...

That's not control, that's bullshit.

Apple got permissions right long before Android did: no third party apps have intrinsic permission to use the microphone, address book, location etc until the OS asks me on behalf of that app. And I can always say no if I want.

That hasn't been the case since android 6 (they're on android 8 now). That picture looks like this now:

https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ximg_56...

It works just the same as iOS, where the first time an app wants to use your location/etc it asks android, which shows a prompt:

https://uit.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/images/2016/08/...

And can be revoked as well:

https://img.gadgethacks.com/img/81/78/63633813117897/0/snapc...

iOS is different in a subtle way: once you grant an application permission to use location/microphone, it will show a banner if a background app is using it.

Once you grant e.g. permission to access the microphone to an Android app, it can do so at any time without you noticing. Until you manually go to the settings and revoke the permission, that is.

This happens only if the permission is for ‘while using the app’. This permission means that part of the app needs to be visible on screen and if it’s not, the banner will show.

If you change the permission to ‘always’ the banner won’t show.

That only applies for location access. Even then, you'll see an arrow in the status bar and there's a page in the settings that lets you see which applications are actually accessing your location in the background, and how often.

Mic recording, on the other hand, is always user-initiated and very explicit.

I've heard right here on HN that even in the newer versions of Android, some (prominent?) apps don't work well if you don't grant them the unnecessary (from the user's point of view) permissions. I haven't seen something like that on iOS so far.

With the pace of Android adoption, the new permission model isn't even present on half the devices that have been tracked on the Android Dashboard. [1] Versions 6 and 7 combined are at 48% adoption as of this moment, according to this dashboard.

On the iOS side, the granular permissions model has been around since the last seven years or longer, IIRC. And iOS devices have a much higher rate of new OS adoption, which means almost every iOS device currently in use has the same permission model for a lot longer.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html#Pl...

Yeah, but there are things like some game can backdoor the clipboard while submitting a score or whatever.

I like to know if an app has access to the network. If it does, don't install unless I trust the parent company.

> no third party apps have intrinsic permission to use the microphone, address book, location etc until the OS asks me on behalf of that app.

Actually some of these permissions need to be requested by the first-party apps as well. You can deny the built-in Maps application location updates.

Privacy controls exists both in Android and Apple platforms, but you can be sure of one thing: if you choose to save your data on either clouds, they have the ability to use it for their platform (ML, advertisement suggestions).

Not if that data is encrypted with a key that they don’t have. Which is what Apple does.

True, but alas not for every service as far as I have understood it.

I am particularly interested in storing my photos somewhere, but the details about the encryption have not led me to believe that Apple can't access my photos, which is a must-have requirement to me.

Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

It says 'encryption-server: yes' for photos, but around this table you have the text:

" For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information, and only on devices where you’re signed in to iCloud. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information."

and

"These features and their data are transmitted and stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption: - iCloud Keychain (Includes all of your saved accounts and passwords) - Payment information - Wi-Fi network information - Home data - Siri information"

So alas, no photos.

> iOS apps could be transmitting details back to home without your knowledge.

Erm, so could Android apps? You don't need to request permission for internet access anymore.

> At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right.

It is established knowledge that Apple has been for a very long time (and remains) a partner of the NSA's PRISM mass surveillance program.

Not willingly so.

Apple appears to be doing as much as it legally can to get around that fact, such as in providing end to end encryption on iMessage.

The claim that you have privacy when you buy an Apple product is still a lie.

If you buy tech from one of the US big corps, you simply have no more privacy. That is a simple fact.

[citation needed]

It can't do much legally. If Apple was serious about protecting privacy it would move operation to a different place where law actually still offers some privacy protection.

>If Apple was serious about protecting privacy it would move operation to a different place where law actually still offers some privacy protection.

Do you appreciate what your asking? You're honestly saying if they do something this radical then they're "not serious about privacy"?

Erm, there's a misunderstanding here. I'm saying they cannot be considered as being serious about protecting privacy because they operate from a country that has anti-privacy law.

If they did move to a country with privacy protection then privacy protection could be considered possible.

PRISM is an endpoint for companies to upload data in response to court orders. The alternative would be that they have to provide the same data but employ an army of engineers to manually scrape the results together.

I’m not convinced this is somehow more virtuous than doing it automatically. The warrant was signed, Apples hands are tied either way.

>Google is not content with me asking them to leave me alone, they would use ML and whatever they have built to figure out where I have been

Which is precisely why I stopped syncing my images to Google.

What’s the alternative? Apples Photo’s app is perfectly incapable of syncing photos between 2 Macs and a phone as far as I can tell. It’s not cheap and I’m yet to see it work.

I’m using it with a 45Gb photo library between a phone, a Mac and an iPad with zero problems.

It does take a while for things to arrive at all destinations due to my crappy internet connection but for me it works quite well.

I have over 30,000 photos/videos in iCloud (357GB). Synced between my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.

Works extremely well for me. Set it and forget it.

Doesn't your iPhone capacity get full up? Can you selectively choose what is synced? Last time I tried (a few years ago) it was all or nothing

iOS saves space by only keeping thumbnails locally and loading better versions on de-mand.

You’re gonna be fine :)

Everything lives in the cloud. Once the photo has been uploaded only the preview is stored on your phone. When you tap on the photo or use the photo/video, the phone pulls the full file down from the cloud.

You can set this in the photos setting. You have the option to store all content locally while also backing up everything in th cloud. However, none of my devices have the space for 357GB of photos so I default everything to “optimize local storage”.

I would like the ability to have a single "always local" folder for putting a selection of photos in. Handy for when you have no network, etc.

"Favourites" seems to -almost- have this priority in that they'll more often than not be on the device regardless of age and whether you've specifically downloaded them but it's not -quite- there.

Currently on ~75k photos+videos in iCloud Photos and yeah, syncing is now[1] really good between Macbook, iPhone and iPad. There's times I've saved a photo on the phone and it's been on the iPad before I've swapped devices.

[1] It has been flakey as a weasel's taint in the past.

Anything marketed "cloud" is a privacy liability. Using this defeats the whole privacy issue raised here.

Besides syncing 357GB requires some serious internet which is a privilege of a limited few.

CloudKit, the API Apple introduced a few years ago and what iCloud syncing is built on, has been pretty rock solid. I think your complaint has been the first one I’ve heard about Photos syncing.

I use a couple of things. All photos go to my local NAS (QNAP has an app that does this automatically). They also go to iCloud and I don't have the problem you have with it but then again I use it only for mobile photos so I don't really care about sync as much as about backup.

There's an Android app for https://syncthing.net/ that makes it fairly easy to sync photos between computers+phone, without anything going to the Cloud.

(There's a crowdfund going on for an official iPhone app for Syncthing: https://www.bountysource.com/issues/7699463-native-ios-port-... )

In tht interim, fsync() is a decent read-only Syncthing client.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/fsync/id964427882?mt=8

My girlfriend tried that on her iPhone, but it often didn't update the list of files, or updated only after a very long time, so she went back to emailing herself stuff. fsync() unfortunately still feels very beta.

People say that apple is dead now that steve jobs is gone. They point to the fact that whenever he leaves apple, apple starts to crash. The difference this time is that he appears to have left a legacy and a succession plan. The other times, he just left and apple decided to run itself differently. Steve Jobs and other staff have engrained privacy into the company, and now apple are pulling it out when it is needed even though he isn't even alive.

He did not left as much as been kicked out. Then again he did not engrained privacy but obsession with control into the company. Apple wanting to be in control of every aspect of everything means better apparence of privacy compared to the usual share with third party for profit. The explanation is that the usual is for services based on software who have nothing to sell while apple sells devices.

Google Photos's automatic indexing of pictures is one of its best features. They're not trying to figure out where you have been, they're just saving you the work of tagging your photos. If you put your SF pictures in an album called "Trip to SF" in Apple Photos and sync it with iCloud, Apple "knows where you have been" just as much as Google does.

That is true, their picture indexing is magical and I don't have any issue if they knew I went to SFO, I mean whats the big deal?

Just a story, I took a picture of my car three months ago, someone asked me to show a picture of my car, I just went to google photos, typed "Grey car" and voila ... This is the future.

It's not really the same because if the NSA wants to know where everyone has been, something automatic that applies to everyone is of significant value, while trying to mine Apple's data of people personal folder hierarchies is worthless.

Also, we know Google is actively engaged in mining this data in order to do something. Today it's to improve the user experience which I believe is an honest motivation, but inevitably this empowers a surveillance apparatus that both governments and powerful corporations want.

I think it's worth pushing back a bit on the sort of standard operating procedure of tech companies today, and question where this is all leading. Apple are definitely not saints, but at least they provide something resembling a dissenting viewpoint on the issue of customer data privacy.

Given that:

- Apple was part of the prism program;

- they denied it;

- their platform is so closed you can't have remotely any idea what's it doing;

I would put Apple in the same bag as anyone else and assume they give away everything and then make a big PR noise to pretend they don't.

Only fanboys or naive people would believe the contrary.

iMessage is, as far as anyone knows, end-to-end encrypted.* There is a macOS client, so it seems likely that any backdoor in the encryption would have been found via diassembly by now.

* looks like Apple is trusted for key discovery. Abuse of this trust could be tested with the Mac iMessage client. That can’t detect a targeted attack, of course, but I don’t think that’s what you’re claiming is happening.

Openssl was open source and we still got Heartbleed. It's a long strech to think wd can audit correctly imessage by reverse engineering it.

Difference is that on Android you can use pretty much any photo app/service that you want. Nothing's forcing you into the arms of Google. I don't know much about iPhones, but as far as I understand you don't have much of a choice.

You can even use google photos app on the iPhone. There is no limitation.

Ah, cool. But then I don't see why Android vs iPhone is even a topic here. If the original commenter installs Google Photos on iPhone he'll have to accept the same privacy policy. The underlying OS has nothing to do with it.

There is no reason to discuss android vs iphone, it is the modern version of a classic endless troll.

A privacy version of the godwin point is mentioning google instead of the nazis. Mention the worst known offender and you'll look better in comparison.

Yeah, I don’t know where you’d get that impression. If you want to use Google Photos on the iPhone, you can go ahead and do that.

As I said, I don't know much about iPhones. Thanks for clearing it up. Now I just fail to see why the underlying OS is of any consequence. Seems like the original commenter is making an "Android vs iPhone" issue out of something that has to do with a specific application — namely Google Photos.

Well with iOS you aren't tied into Google's data mining operation. You just have that option.

The original comment was about Google Photos, which isn't forced on you in Android either...

You know what else they launched in 2010 ( when this video was made)

iAd..

It isn't successful though, so i hope you can read between the lines of Apple caring about privacy ;)

PS. I'd like to see if they limit the knowledge of Siri because they care about your privacy.

Another comment mentions why it wasn't successful basically because Apple wouldn't give up user information and dictated banner size.

You mean statistics about who the visitors are? Personal information is never given out, so that's a bogus reason

You are splitting hairs. What the parent commenter meant is that Apple refused to collect a lot of the information that advertisers were interested in to target their audiences.

Google are really starting to annoy me in this regard - I've been an Android user since 2010, never owned an iPhone, although I've owned Macs and iPods in the past.

For me, Google are very good at giving you security settings and then completely ignoring them or resetting them to defaults when you're not looking. This in addition to, if you want to be able to do anything with an Android phone, even things that don't even seem to relate to this, you have to consent to giving Google more data to mine. You can't just turn on your location to allow your weather app (regardless of its backend location provider) to show you your local forecast, you have to consent to sending your location to Google on a regular basis. Granted, with most of the processing done on the Google cloud, it's probably unavoidable now.

My current gripe with them, though, is that I specifically switch off my GPS. Two reasons for this - 1. is battery life. I have no need for my weather app to refresh and then get my pinpoint location (which it will, it just requests the most accurate location available from the subsystem) when the cell-tower location will suffice. 2. is that I have no desire for every app on my phone to be able to work out where I am at any time.

On several occasions, however, I'll be in a commercial establishment (shop, restaurant etc.) and a notification on my phone will appear, asking me for further information about the exact store I'm currently in. I've been asked to review the restaurant or if I know the website for the fish and chip shop I'm standing in. How does this happen? Why, the Wifi-Scanning-in-Sleep-Mode option gets randomly re-enabled, of course. And because Google decided to log the SSIDs and MAC addresses of every broadcasting wireless network when they drove the Street View cars, this information is as accurate as GPS. Not to mention, I switch my wifi off when I'm not using it for battery reasons, and this totally undermines the point of having a Wifi Off switch.

I keep switching this option off and Google keeps switching it back on. I'm beyond fed up with their total lack of respect for my privacy. There's also the fact that, not only do they go out of their way to figure out where I am, they then expect me to answer questions. It's like a man in a Google uniform suddenly leaps out of the nearest bin with a clipboard as I'm either waiting for dessert or walking out the door.

I've experienced the Apple lock-in before with my iPods and I'm not keen to sign my life over to an iDevice, but I am getting to the point where they seem to be the only way out of this cycle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302675 ...

>In a free system, the users could have done this themselves years ago instead of waiting for Apple.

Is this satire? If there's one thing the open source movement has proven, it's that without the backing of a business very little will happen. If there were some "free" mobile system out there, the only way it could work is if there was a "red hat mobile" type of company funding its development. Random "users" generally wouldn't fix anything just as they don't fix Linux/Mozilla/etc. bugs now.

Canonical (Red Hat, Ubuntu editon) tried to build a mobile OS. It got scrapped.

The video you just mentioned is a little bit more than 3 minutes, without technical evidence and spoken by one of the best public speakers we've seen. It's ok thinking that Apple focus on your privacy but make sure to see some real evidence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com