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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

It's not that I think Apple is my friend, thier business and my interest align. I pay them money and they give me stuff. My iPhone doesn't have carrier crap, the Mac doesn't have any crapware on it.

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Second this. I take privacy pretty seriously and their track record has been better than their competitors so far. I don’t care if they are riding a popular public opinion as long as it leads to a better outcome for their users.

There is quite a bit of apple crapware on my ipad pro that i can't delete but instead must move to a folder called bloatware

aren't all apps deletable since iOS 11? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208094

I wasn't aware of that. I must try again. I guess i was running iOS 10 the last time i tried. Thanks for the link

No. You can’t replace the phone dialer, contacts, messages or safari.

I define “crap ware” as crippled software where a company is trying to get you to spend more money.

I just got a brand new iPhone running iOS 11 - as opposed to the prior phone that I had that was upgraded to iOS 11. I didn’t realize that all of Apple’s iWork and iLife apps were installed by default. They are full featured apps so I wouldn’t consider them “crapware”. I did delete them though.

I don't really get this logic. If your usage and data is worth something to Apple's competitors, its worth something to Apple too. Sure, "if you're not paying you're the product not the customer" but you could pay and still be the product all the same.

Their competitors cannot cash in public goodwill, but Apple can. Overall it seems as if this usage and data has no value to Apple because it's chosen that the good PR it gets from not collecting information outweighs the possible benefits that come from data collection.

It does have tangible, countable value. Apple may elect not to sell it for now, but they can change their mind at any time in the future. This is not to say that people shouldn't use them over demonstrably worse competitors (privacy-wise), just that there is no such thing as a company's soul, and they will betray your trust when the math adds up to it.

There is a company’s soul when it’s run and fully controlled by the founder. After that all bets are off.

Yes it has value, but it also has cost. If Apple were to begin monetizing user data, their brand would be impacted and users would be less willing to purchase products from them. That has serious bottom line consequence, and Apple has spent years (decades!) building a particular brand image that this would undermine.

Re: company's soul, companies are made of individuals, and if those individuals are opposed to the companies practices, the company can lose those people. Apple has a particularly well-defined and long lasting culture, and it'd be a huge change to who they are and who works there. Talent+brand risk the kind of risk a business wouldn't take unless it was a last resort. Sure it could happen, but there's a lot of more realistic hypotheticals to ponder in the world.

Sure, but for now they are conducting themselves pretty well. I'll deal with the future if it happens.

I find this pretty strong proof: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/04/as...

For those not clicking: the article writer did a (I think, not entirely certain) legally binding request for the data Google, Facebook and Apple have on him. Google delivered a 243Mb zip, Facebook a staggering 881Mb and Apple just 9Mb.

Proof of what? That Google includes your Gmail, Gmail attachments, Photos, Videos, Music, Drive files, etc in their data exports.

But Apple is investing so heavily in the privacy branding that they have much more to lose by doing so.

I think what they’ve done in China shows that this premise is tenuous at best, and subject to change given the right “incentives.”

What they’ve done in China was one of two options, the other is “abandon China”. The US doesn’t have a legal framework to ban a company. They do.

Good point. So with enough pressure in the US, they'd fold.

Thanks to the Constitution that would be a three part effort but I have no doubt that it’s doable in today’s America. With one more Supreme Court vacancy Trump could surely do it.

Yeah, and this is strange. Why would Apple so strongly resist pressure from the FBI, and then cave to Chinese authorities? For the Chinese case, there was language about respecting nations' laws. So in the US case, were they arguing on Constitutional grounds?

In the US, the Constitution is the law. In China, the law is set by the party in power. Apple has to respect the law in China to sell in China.

The FBI was compelling Apple to develop new software for them for free. Caving would allow the FBI to make similar demands at will, compared to China having an entry requirement.

If they are being truthful about how data is stored - it's encrypted and only the end user has the private key - it shouldn't present a privacy risk.

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