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Comment by 0xJRS | Hacker News Reader

As someone who does own an iPhone i'm genuinely curious what your largest concerns are about its privacy

You have absolutely no control over what runs on your phone. You cannot even audit the software without breaking into your own device. The broadband firmware is known to be bad quality security-wise and it's tightly connected to the rest of the system. It's a walled garden where specific corporation has complete control over your privacy and you have no other choice than to trust them. Plus Apple has been already seen granting exceptional permissions to some apps like Uber for unclear reasons, so you have to trust third parties as well.

As someone who uses free software and worked closely with some mobile privacy-related projects, it's headscrambling to see iPhone users talking about privacy. I won't use it; you're free to do so, but when it comes to your privacy, it's just a delusion. At least be aware of what you've got - no security and privacy is way better than a false sense of it.

Apple's documented history of working with the NSA to undermine the privacy of its users: PRISM. Tim Cook struck that deal with the NSA and remains CEO today.

It is not true that Tim Cook struck a deal with the NSA. Nor is it true that Apple has worked with the NSA for PRISM.

NSA likely exploited the SSL vulnerability in iOS 6.0 (released Sept 2012, NSA added Apple Oct 2012) and got access to snoop on Apple's data.

After pulling the phrase "participate knowingly" out of thin air, Washington Post was forced to walk back that statement:

"Hours after the news broke, and every company bar PalTalk and AOL denied any knowledge of the program and allegations of their involvement, the Post has changed its stance. The phrase “participate knowingly” has been removed from the article, a new passage suggests the firms were unaware of PRISM"

https://thenextweb.com/us/2013/06/07/wapost-backtracks-on-cl...

That it's essentially legal for "the intelligence community" to do this sort of thing is insane.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that it was an SSL vulnerability that constituted inclusion in PRISM? There are zero-days discovered all the time.

Are you really suggesting that prior to Sept 2012 there were no critical zero-day vulnerabilities to which the NSA had access? Surely by your reasoning, Apple should have been included in PRISM years prior. And yet, it wasn't until after Steve Jobs died that Apple began to participate.

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