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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe the next iOS update comes with privacy intrusion because it's more lucrative.

Apple has demonstrated time and time again their commitment to privacy and to protecting user data.

Apple does not see user data as something to be hoarded. They see user data as a liability and work very hard to collect as little as possible in order to provide the services they do.

The idea that Apple is going to discard all of this and add privacy intrusion into iOS, doing a completely 180° on their business model and discarding all of their corporate principles, is extremely unlikely.

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You need user data to feed machine learning algorithms to make your product (siri, predictive text, face unlock, etc.) better.

That alone is a very strong reason to hoard data if you're Apple.

Sure, but Apple has been researching and applying privacy-preserving techniques like differential privacy. And they do a lot of their machine learning on-device (e.g. face unlock is entirely on-device).

Really the big outlier here is Siri, I'm sure they could make Siri better if they were willing to hoard data, but Apple has demonstrated that they value user privacy much higher than the incremental improvement they'd make with Siri, and violating user privacy would likely hurt their business a lot more than making Siri a bit better would help.

Careful there with Kool Aid.

Agreed, it would be nice to have an actual conversation about the issues in the mobile market right now instead of pointing to one of the 2 major companies, that nobody should really be 100% confident about.

IMO both Google and Apple aren't saints. Apple had a fairly similar headline in 2011[1]. Now watch people here on HN explain why that was completely different. It's a guarantee.

We really should be focusing coming up with ideas on what we can do. My friend for example (and this isn't a perfect solution) but he bought 2 phones, one of these for calling:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41AwGb3pKCL...

(extremely thin in real life)

And then he caries a smartphone for encrypted chat apps etc. He removed a bunch of hardware chips from the smartphone so even if you put a simcard it it doesn't connect anywhere. Also the microphone was removed and some other things. It works great. At first he had it with the simcard still in, but he wanted more privacy. Personally, I would have kept a 4g only simcard or something, it's kind of a trade-off because now he can only chat on wifi.

It's far from perfect, but at least he's trying something.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tr...

> Apple had a fairly similar headline in 2011[1]. Now watch people here on HN explain why that was completely different. It's a guarantee.

Ok, since you’ve so eloquently asked - a local copy of your location history that colllected when location services are turned on is completely different from remotely collecting location data even when you’ve explicitly disabled location services.

Any attempt to say these are the same thing has gone beyond naive to willfully ignorant at best.

Thank you for pointing this out. For a community of fairly intelligent people, hacker news comenters fall back on false equivalence near constantly.

I am all ears to see you evidence that this is just Kool Aid. As iOS developer I at least see all the API changes them make to make tracking users (or rather, phones) more and more difficult. You don't even get to access the true MAC from your phone.

Apple has demonstrated time and time again their commitment to privacy and to protecting user data.

Google's entire business is carefully balanced on user trust. Anyone who posits some naive "they're an ad company" nonsense is just muddying the waters. Google is a user-trust company in a variety of spheres, and without that trust they would be annihilated.

Apple does not see user data as something to be hoarded

I've gotten downvoted elsewhere and will gladly eat it up to warn against this utterly ludicrous kool-aid fueled naivety. Apple says whatever nonsense gets a cheer at their latest product reveal. But if you don't think they're desperately vacuuming up data for their machine learning to stay ahead of the game, you should rethink your positions.

I remember virtually identical claims about Microsoft a decade ago, as an aside. Hell, in conversations about Google versus Microsoft, no less. Then Microsoft, you know, started viciously hoovering up user data like there's no tomorrow.

Siri is so far behind Amazon and Google's voice assistants that if they're Hoovering up the datas, they're doing it wrong.

I'm a (mostly) happy [0] Apple customer. The lack of evidence that they are gathering all my bits makes me comfortable to use their products. I strongly feel we'd hear leaks about how they are saying one thing and doing another if they were. Employees of Apple aren't that loyal.

Yet here we are with Google and their "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" attitude.

[0] iOS 11 is bad. Just bad.

You realize that Apple admitted to collecting cell tower and wifi data years ago, wholly separate from any location data, right? That they still do to this day.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/04/27Apple-Q-A-on-Locati...

It is impossible that a unique device submits data about cell and wifi locations in an "anonymous" way aside from putting another party in between (a party that you'd have to trust), and that caveat is outrageously nonsensical to anyone with a hint of technical capability. But we trust that Apple is then mangling it up. Or do they?

Does Apple still collect that data if location services are turned off and the device has no sim? Then I would be outraged.

My guess is that they don't given that they have a setting in location services called "Wi-Fi networking". But this should definitely be investigated...

Why is it impossible? It's only "impossible" if cell phones have unique IP addresses. But, and I admit I've never tested this, my understanding is cell phones may switch IP addresses any time they reconnect to the network.

And even if a cell phone does keep the same IP address for a long time, I'm confident that Apple is completely ignoring the IP address for each submission and taking only the encrypted location data. Apple has gone to great lengths to preserve privacy in so many other cases, it's outrageously nonsensical to accuse Apple of trying to match IP addresses with location data to identify individual devices (and besides, even if they did do that, all they'd know is the rough location history of some device, but nothing at all about what that device is or who owns it).

Good point about Microsoft, they went full Google. But they were much better at privacy before changing course.

Apple is also much better at privacy now. Maybe they'll also change course and then we might as well stop using smartphones, cause we're being treated like sheep.

The non-Siri Apple machine learning is happening on device. This is something that Google would consider doing for 5s, before all in the meeting would start laughing and they'd go for uploading everything.

The difference being Apple has put their money where their mouth is. The secure enclave, the FBI case...

>Apple has demonstrated time and time again their commitment to privacy and to protecting user data.

Remind me again, which company pulled out of China, Apple or Google?

...neither?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Controversies

There is this line in the link you shared.

"In 2014, in response to a series of terrorist attacks, China made all Google services almost unusable by tightening its Internet censorship, often called the "Great Firewall of China"

That would only happen if Google didn't comply with Chinese govt. unlike the other company we are talking about.

That is oversimplifying the issue greatly. There's far more involved than just "not complying". There's many reasons why Google would be banned, the biggest of which is Baidu being a massive local competitor that is both pro-government and pro-censorship.

Apple, on the other hand, is a consumer brand that is wildly popular worldwide. People save up for these devices, they sell out within minutes and people go to extreme lengths to line up in store for them. There would be much more anger for banning them than Google.

Can you post a link to close my appleID? Yes, you can close a Google/ Microsoft account with few clicks

It should be available, at least in the EU, by May, if it isn’t already. I think it is a requirement of GDPR.

Similar measures have been implemented in a number of european countries for years, I think originally in France. As far as I am aware, GDPR only standardises these laws and applies them to all EU states. Plus it adds a fine large enough for companies to actually care.

The fines are indeed substantial: up to 4% of annual turnover. On top of thay they can force you to shut down the service in question until remediated. For an e-commerce company that can be even worse than the 4%.

Being fully compliant with GDPR is a mountain of work even if you thought you were doing all the right things before.

In practice, small companies/ start-ups might not be audited / reported / pursued very much but: a) you'll never know and b) at least all the big tech and e-commerce companies are smack on in the sights of several data protection and competition(!) authorities already. We're all scrambling to be compliant in time.

Source: first hand account from running the GDPR compliance project in e-commerce company.

The fine is actually 4% of global annual revenue, or EUR100,000, whichever is greater.

Oh fair point. I propose we all start calling the 100kEUR minimum the "start-up clause". ;)

For the moment not possible.

Try it. It is not available.

Did you try googling "delete apple id"? It's pretty straightforward. Given that, what point are you trying to make?

There is a way to delete your data from Google or ms. Not Apple. BTW, there is no way to delete apple Id. Seriously try doing it. You cannot.

You can call AppleCare and have your Apple ID deleted any time you want.

you actually don't believe that they delete your data, do you?

Not sure why you are being downvoted, but as someone who did try deleting an appleid, there is no self service way of doing so. Basically ended up removing all possible data; and filling the rest with fake values. Finally I changed the password to some random string. Not sure how much aux/opaque data remains that I could not see (eg location services), but this was secondary throwaway account, so I didnt care much.

It is sad hn users are too much apple biased.

This must be one of those "alternative facts" I keep hearing about.

I literally just now created, and then deleted, an Apple Id. It's trivial. Why do you think it isn't?

How did u delete? Care to post a screenshot?

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