Plausibly they care for many things and trade them off.
But more importantly: who cares? We’re not judging whether Tim Cook oughta get into heaven.
People seem highly driven by the profit motive, arguably more than by most other motives. If Apple’s goals are aligned with mine and motivated by profit so they’re likely to be careful to keep from damaging their reputation... great!
It's also been brought up by others that Apple discards its privacy morals when it comes to China. Which is another point in the "probably doesn't actually care about privacy" column. Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is most often true. The simplest explanation here is self-interest.
To be absolutely clear, i'm not disparaging them for taking this position. I think it's great. I'm just trying to contextualize it.
And we also know that nothing about writing walled software ecosystems prevents one from syphoning this data.
So it would appear that Apple has purposefully left money on the table.
So please tell me how that fits with your 'self-interest' explanation of Apple's stance here.
Taking a more strategic perspective, you would look around and see that your competitors have to collect this data to survive. But you don't. That makes this a weakness for them, which means that it's a differentiating factor for your product that they can never copy. This strategic advantage is worth much more than the few billion in quick cash they might pick up by monetizing their user data.
Not only that, but having taken this stance so strongly, it makes any future relaxations of their self-imposed rule an even riskier move as it exposes them to hypocrisy. So it's clearly a double edged sword. And while it's certain Google depends on data now, nothing stops them from making excellent phones with excellent hardware with privacy to boot to compete with Apple on their turf.
Microsoft owns LinkedIn, which is an advertising company. I also seem to recall that they make a reasonable chunk of change from search advertising and other online properties.
According to this link they took in a little over 6 billion in advertising revenue last year:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...
According to this link, amazon took in somewhere in the region of 1.7 billion in revenue from mainly advertising last quarter alone:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-corpora...
Apple loves privacy and hates freedom. It sure looks like the only thing they actually care about is their financial interest.
Hates freedome how? This statement is overbroad.
In a nutshell, I would rather support Apple as they're primarily a hardware company that has stated their privacy interests align with mine. As opposed to me supporting an advertising company that happens to sell phones and produce a mobile operating system that seems tailored to do the opposite.
The fact that I can't install my own OS is entirely tangential to the overall company goals of Apple versus Google or even Samsung. Focusing on a phone platform to behave as if it was the PC platform of the 80's reminds me of the for want of a nail proverb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail
Focusing too far down on "freedom" from the gnu perspective will just put us into territory we can't cover at all realistically right now.
Besides which, I just want to use my phone, not spend endless hours fucking around with it to install all manner of stuff.
In the sense that their devices are not free.
> Besides which, I just want to use my phone, not spend endless hours fucking around with it to install all manner of stuff.
The fact that you don't want to use it that way is hardly relevant to the question of freedom.
Listen, i'm not saying they should spend a bunch of time engineering a solution to support this use case. I'm not saying they should aid people in doing it in any way. But that's not all they're doing. They actively expend resources to thwart people controlling their own devices. It is their corporate policy not just not to support this behavior, but to make it technologically impossible. That is the key point.
If Apple had just said "if you modify the OS, you void your warrant and you're on your own - we offer you zero support", i'd be totally fine with that. Personally, i'm not interested in modifying my device at all, i'm happy to leave it as is. But to go out of their way to make it impossible to do that? That's anti-freedom, no matter how you slice it.
I think Apple understands this. The freedom you desire has ecosystem effects which I don't want.
You may quibble about precisely how hard is hard enough. Maybe they could loosen up a little bit, walk some middle path, and satisfy both of our desires. Maybe. Has anyone done it? Apparently people will sign anything you ask them to in order to play farmville. And every jailbreak seems like a security hole I'd rather not have.
In short, you are still free to not buy their hardware.
The fact that this privacy protection happens to be in the financial interest of Apple pleases me, because they are unlikely to sell out long-term interests in protecting reputation for short-term gain in abusing my trust. This alignment of interests makes Apple a better guardian of my privacy, not worse.
None of that is true. All they need to do is create an opt-out mechanism to over-ride those security settings that requires authentication. It's trivial to have both, they just choose not to.
How is letting you install your own OS helping with improving privacy?
In today's world can you really decouple hardware and software if you want strict controls over data and hence privacy?
Only in your opinion. A non-free system whose vendor has an incentive to protect privacy may also provide even stronger privacy protection for the masses than a system that meets your version of 'freedom'.
This isn't a "version" of freedom. It is what freedom literally means. You can say you're willing to sacrifice some freedom to gain privacy, sure. But from a technical perspective, that's a totally false choice.
To dive straight towards the third-rail of this conversation, some people think that being able to go out and buy a gun makes them more free while other people think that the ability of other people (of possibly questionable mental state or moral character) to buy a gun increases the probability that they will be killed by someone else with a gun and because of this they are less free. Both are correct.
If only the market would allow us to make a choice as to which version of freedom we wish to engage in and would provide us with multiple competing platforms that represent alternative visions of computing and informational autonomy. If only...
How, exactly? Are you saying that the burden of potentially unlocking your device in error, even if Apple makes that a convoluted, explicit process makes you less free? If i'm misunderstanding your argument, let me know. If i'm not, I think we both know it's totally silly.
Apple actively chooses to not pursue these revenue streams even though they have the resources and reach to do so.
I disagree. Apple can't compete in those spaces effectively because they're already owned by Google/FB. Microsoft has similar resources to Apple, and they tried to compete with Google on search - look how that turned out. Even Google can't compete with FB in social, look at Google Plus.
Apple has, intelligently, recognized that they cannot compete in that space. So they aren't trying. They are then using that to their advantage, by focusing on privacy, which is something their competitors cannot focus on. It's a perfectly legitimate strategy, and there's nothing wrong with them doing that. I support it wholeheartedly.
On the contrary however, it is not in Apple's strategic interest to give users's sovereignty over their devices. In both cases, their behavior aligns not with user interests, but with their own. Being financially self-interested better explains the sum total of Apple's behavior than any interest in user well-being.
The more consumers support privacy as a selling feature, the more Apple will guard it. I'll gladly pay a premium to a company that has a vested interest in keeping my shit safe, and a straightforward business model of keeping me happy enough to sell me more shiny things.
Getting someone's phone number has always felt like a much higher bar than their FB since you could harass them with calls, SMS, etc and it's more difficult to block. Plus there's an implicit sexual connotation if you ask a woman for her phone number that doesn't apply to Facebook or LinkedIn.
I really don't like how WhatsApp piggybacks on phone numbers and phone contacts but clearly I'm in a tiny minority given how successful they've become.
I don't have a Facebook account.
> Getting someone's phone number has always felt like a much higher bar than their FB since you could harass them with calls, SMS, etc and it's more difficult to block.
It's quite easy to block a number. If they'll go as far as to use a different phone to call you, then they could also use someone else's FB account too.
> Plus there's an implicit sexual connotation if you ask a woman for her phone number that doesn't apply to Facebook or LinkedIn.
That's probably something specific to your culture or a misconception on your part. I don't see how the two actions are different when in the same context, except friending someone on FB means you let them not only try communicate you, but observe a certain period of your past and see pictures/videos/posts of yours. I can't see how that's not more demanding in terms of privacy than asking for someone's phone number.
I'd ideally go for an e-mail address instead of both of them, but well...