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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple.

For example, the "best" calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I'm not a fan of hooktube either - it just further cements YouTube's monopoly.

I think what what bothers me is that "privacy focused" tends to be conflated with FOSS. I'm really thankful for organizations like Mozilla and Signal that are trying to deliver privacy focused applications to real people. However I also think we should recognize Apple-like companies who are also privacy focused without necessarily being FOSS. I think that will help move more non-technical people out of central databases.

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It's not that "privacy-focused" tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.

This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

This is true iff you look through the code yourself, or are willing to trust that others have done so in as thorough a manner as your use case (attack vectors) necessitate.

Apple isn't worth consideration if you are willing to put in the effort, or delegate trust, to other systems. If you'd prefer to delegate trust to them, how is that effectively different that FOSS that you haven't examined?

Incentive.

When devs announce how their software handles privacy concerns, they have an incentive to be honest because all it takes is one discovery of conflicting code and their trust is lost. But if the code is closed source, that incentive for honesty is removed. Of course the media can still seek circumstantial evidence and make accusations, but that’s a far cry from version control.

Separately, closed source code invites new incentives to disrespect user privacy for profit.

So, there are these two major categories involved, both of which are mitigated by opening the source code.

Apple remains liable for both of them.

All that Apple has is an observation that they sell hardware too. I guess we are just assuming they already make enough money from advertising as it is and don’t really want more.

I think there is a significant difference.

Companies get hit with multi-million dollar fines for violating their privacy policies. So there's your incentive.

I just don't see open source as better protecting privacy. See for example the telemetry in .NET Core or VS Code [1]. Users discover this stuff by watching network traffic, not through code audits.

1: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/16131

Is a multi-million dollar fine enough to matter?

Let’s assume Apple violated their privacy policy and was fined $999 million, the highest “multi-million dollar” fine they could be assessed. That’s just barely more than 1% of their market cap.

Fines are definitely incentive to do right but the fine must be felt. I’m not aware of any cases where the tech giants have been levied a fine that really hits them hard.

The fine you're proposing would cause a much larger hit to market cap than you're suggesting. Consider, Apple made ~20 billion in profit last quarter, your hypothetical fine would be a precipitous hit to profit margin which, when reported on the quarterly earnings call, would cause an abrupt downturn in share price. Consider the 13% hair cut earlier this year when the market thought Apple was going to miss. Then there's the existential panic of "does this mean Apple is in for more such fines?".

I guess jail time will have to do.

Fines are accounted as overhead.

Watching network traffic is limited to circumstantial evidence, and not even that without a circumstantially isolated environment. Those are a couple of scenarios where these accusations can be made.

Let's consider the incentives in each case and how they enable you to distribute your trust. Apple is a for-profit, publicly traded corporation. Their purpose is to make money, and they will likely do whatever they can to achieve that. More importantly, only they can see their code, not you and not other users. All you can possibly have is their word, and they will say whatever it takes to sell you their product. If they lie or exaggerate, there's no way you or anyone else could know.

On the other hand, open source projects come in all shapes and sizes. Generally, they have a strong community of both developers and users around them. If you don't feel like looking at the code, you don't even have to trust the project itself. You can look to the community and its abundance of users, at least a few of which have audited the code and share your use case. And these users aren't just neutral third parties. Nay, they're better than that. They, too, value their own privacy, and are therefore motivated to protect it.

This is silly. Apple publishes their privacy policy. If they were found to be violating it, they would lose business and be liable for expensive lawsuits. And security researchers are extremely good at finding these things. So yes, Apple has a very powerful incentive to tell the truth.

As for the theory of "open source community," see the MyBTGWallet scam. This open source project, recommended by the Bitcoin Gold team, stole $5 million via a single line of code. Being open source isn't much protection really.

He's telling you about the fact that there's conflict of interest between you and crapple and you tell him an anecdote where some scum of this earth stole money and open source software was involved. Does this really sound like a compelling argument?

Yes. There are bad and good actors on all sides.

Just because something is closed source doesn’t make it bad. And just because something is open doesn’t automatically make it good.

It does however increase the chance that it will be bad, because the average snake that produces closed source software is likely to be motivated by greed, so it has the incentive to milk you as hard as it can without turning you away from products (using lies of course, you can't check anything after all, it's closed shit).

But seeing sibling explanation being downvoted into oblivion makes me think no one is interested in discussing this anyway so why waste breath.

Apple makes its money from expensive hardware. And respecting your privacy and security helps selling it a lot. And they earned trust by being serious about it for a long time.

Uhm 2014 ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...

By comparaison, while there have been a few issues with Google, for a company that processes so much personal data, their track record is excellent. I can't think of any major personal data leak that could be attributed to Google.

Maybe Apple got better within these 4 years, TBH, they most likely did. However, I don't consider 4 years to be a "long time" for a tech giant. Their privacy focus is relatively recent.

The iPhone 5s is the first one with a great secure enclave, and it was planned out a lot longer than 4 years ago.

Did you even read the Wiki article you linked to? Even if we ignore your conflation of information security and privacy, the Fappening was not caused by a security breach at Apple, but rather through the use of targeted phishing attacks.

Definitely, and note that GP explicitly mentioned security, which is a good thing because they are tightly linked. You can't have privacy if you don't have security.

The thing is: we often associate ad tracking and (lack of) privacy. It is certainly one aspect, but it is far from the whole picture. The most damaging form of privacy violations are usually not caused by advertisers but first by people who are close to you (ex: revenge porn), and second by hackers (ex: blackmail). I used the fappening as an example because nude pictures are the archetype of private data.

As for targeting phishing, I think companies who take privacy seriously have to do something about it. Phishing is the number one threat users face when it comes to cybersecurity and therefore privacy.

Now comes the debatable part: hackers targeted the iCloud platform, why? Why not Picasa, or Facebook, or whatever place images are stored? My hypothesis is that iCloud was the best target for such an attack, partly because compared to the others, it didn't offer as much anti-phishing security.

EDIT: I just noticed I didn't mention governments. First, for most people in western countries, government is unlikely to be their biggest problem. So I would rather focus on the immediate surroundings (ex: boss, partner, neighbors, etc...). And if the government really is after you, then an Apple solution might be good, but I don't think they are completely turstworthy. They are still bound by the US law after all, and they are not completely zero-knowledge. To make things clear, Google and Facebook are also out in that case.

> Now comes the debatable part: hackers targeted the iCloud platform, why? Why not Picasa, or Facebook, or whatever place images are stored?

Possibly because the celebrities targeted used iPhones, and didn’t publish their private pictures to Facebook or a Google service.

Until it paid for them them to sell out their Chinese customers. There they didn't think for a second.

I have no more trust in the American government to not spy on its citizens than the Chinese government. If iCloud data is encrypted and only the user has the private key. It's just as secure as being on American servers.

The difference being that Tim Cook handed Beijing the iCloud private keys for Chinese users

How did he do that without completely rearchitecting how iOS works? Do you have any citations?

I'm not saying that this is what happened and I don't know the background of this story, but it would have been easy (technically speaking) to just push an update to Chinese users that will extract their private key and send it back to Apple without any significant changes.

AFAIK the Secure Enclave chip is specifically designed to make this impossible. There is no planned method to extract the private key from it. ("Planned method" meaning anything that's not an exploit or an electron microscope.)

Maybe generate the key in the normal processor, send it to apple for escrow, and then push the key to the secure enclave? I have no idea whether the secure enclave supports loading existing keys, but generally this is how it's done.

This is about the architecture of iCloud not iOS. Apple has the keys to all encrypted iCloud data (iCloud email is not encrypted at rest).

The only exception is iCloud keychain, but I believe only if you decline the default setting to create an iCloud security code (I'm not entirely sure about that)

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

Note that only some of your iCloud data is end-to-end encrypted: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht202303. The rest is also encrypted, but Apple does have the key and can likely be legally compelled to share it with authorities.

What am I missing? According to the link, everything is encrypted at rest besides email. No one thinks email is secure.

> I have no more trust in the American government to not spy on its citizens than the Chinese government.

This is more than a little hyperbolic. In the US you need a warrant.

Snowden?

Also, in the U.S., police don’t shoot unarmed suspects, get caught planting evidence on camera and the judicial system prosecuted and convicts fairly regardless of race and class and always follow the rules.....

Apple actually had some of the worst security for a long time. They even lied about Mac OS being immune to viruses rather than market share so low hackers didn't care about it. They still made piles of money due to great product development and marketing. Their brand was the main, selling point for a long time. The iOS situation is quite a turn around for them on privacy/security. They still sell them on mainly image, features, apps, and so on. Just like before [plus Windows-style app dominance] with privacy/security reporting in media likely about boosting sales.

I don't trust it, though, if we're talking domestic surveillance. The ECI-level leaks said FBI "compels" domestic companies to enable their stuff for eavesdropping. Whatever that means is secret. In the Lavabit case, the FBI argued to the judge Lavabit wouldn't be harmed if they lied to their customers about the compromised. The judge agreed. So, court orders, fines, retaliation, forced lies, and secrecy orders of all that are a possibility in the United States. Just don't put secrets on anything made in America or by Americans. You can use American tech for obfuscation or untrusted functions, though.

Pre OS X versions of Apple OS had even smaller market share and way more viruses than current versions with much bigger market share.

I use Apple products instead of Google's. They also look much better.

> Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.

I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position. A relatively small proportion of the general population has the skills to meaningfully look at the code, never mind the time. Moreover, even for someone who is capable, such an exercise quickly becomes non-trivial on an unfamiliar codebase for an app of any complexity.

In many cases there's also no guarantee that the code you're reading is the code that's running.

> I find this to be an extremely un-compelling position

It's more damaging than that. The bundling of privacy and FOSS advocacy weakens the former. Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS. The potential audience for a privacy pitch is broader. By bundling the two, however, the technical advocacy community limits the appeal of the former to those supporting the latter. This is an issue because the opponents of privacy rights are not similarly limited. Hence, we find ourselves reliant on Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon being benevolent dictators, in their services and Washington.

> Few without deep technical knowledge is sympathetic to FOSS.

Few without deep technical knowledge do even know what FOSS is.

Yes, all they know is “this is impossible to install” and “what is a GitHub” and “where do I log in to the cloud?” and “this is the ugliest software I have ever seen in my life”.

Unless we’re talking about hosted FOSS, in which case you get the worst of both worlds.

I run my own mail server so this comes from a place of love: FOSS for server side products for consumers is a joke.

That's something reproducible builds address.

You can't check if the server actually runs that reproducible builds.

Right, that really only helps for local binaries.

Even then, it might work well for you, and if I had the patience or the time it could work well for me, but it'll never be of any use to my mum or my brother, neither of whom are technical.

I suppose it depends on how it ends up being implemented. I was envisioning something fairly automated, which could presumably spit out PACKAGE VERIFIED information that could be used in systems not requiring users to be technical.

While I generally agree with you about the soundness of the FOSS==privacy argument, I think you're misstating it subtly. The claim isn't necessarily that the privacy sensitive user specifically will be able to audit the source but rather that someone somewhere will have done, and will have written about problems they uncovered. See also many eyes making all bugs shallow.

Not always. Heartbleed was present in OpenSSL for two years before anyone noticed.

Many eyes make all bugs shallow, but if there aren’t enough eyes with the skills or the time then problems will remain deep, even for important software like this.

Perhaps everyone thought everyone else had done the work?

OpenSSL can just as easily act as a point towards FOSS for privacy given that it was a vuln that was discovered externally (multiple times by distinct parties).

Heartbleed was a very subtle security bug, the discussion here is about privacy violations. You think that detecting if, I dunno, mutt is secretly uploading your contact list is going to escape detection for years?

It will. IIRC HomeBrew’s integration of Goigle Analytics went unnoticed for almost a year, and only then they included an opt-out option (it’s still opt-in by default)

Closed source code, even if it has no hidden purpose, may be hackable as well. Nothing is perfect. I think you are making an unfair comparison.

Heartbleed was found though.

Thinking out loud here, what's the best counterfactual on HB?

I can imagine a ClosedSSL that gets hammered in a blackhat presentation. I can imagine ClosedSSL getting fixed, eventually.

It's just hard for me to imagine that happening faster because people like Neel couldn't read the code.

Maybe the counterfactual is that ClosedSSL is also well funded and cares deeply about security, so it finds HB internally.

But openness doesn't preclude funding. And closed source doesn't grant you an automatic security focus.

So rich ClosedSSL vs poor OpenSSL isn't an apples to apples comparison.

All things held equal, openness provides one extra possible avenue to find and catch bugs, and so such projects will tend to have more caught on average.

What does HB teach us then? Just that some bugs are hard.

Now, to be fair, if "openness" is just used as a substitute for internal security audits, a way to shrug and farm out that work and blame to passers-by, then that would be obviously terrible.

That probably happens more than we'd like to admit, but I still don't think it's the typical reason people open their code.

With tools like Guix (and then hopefully, eventually distributed networks like IPFS / Dat doing the distribution) we will be able to have people audit free software and every user being guaranteed to have the exact version that was audited.

The future looks good if we just continue to implement it the way it should be.

That's provably false when you get to the bottom of what makes proprietary software trustworthy: it has to be verified by qualified people who you trust after being designed and built with enough rigor to not have accidental flaws. That's regardless of whether it's proprietary or FLOSS. I went into detail here:

https://pastebin.com/EZQWbwCB

In fact, the first systems that resisted strong pentesting by NSA were proprietary, shared- or closed-source systems. They shredded everything else. Two are below with another designed like that. The first, safe, kind-of-secure machine that I know of was Burroughs B5000 whose CPU did things like stop overflows, protect pointers, and check function arguments. It was immune to common, root causes of many failures or attacks. OS in a type-safe, high-level language (ALGOL variant). It was a proprietary system whose source was shared with customers. Linux systems still don't have as much code-level security in average case as that proprietary software from 1961. The virtualization solutions in FLOSS still aren't produced as securely as VAX VMM or the separation kernels that followed in 2000's with VMM's layered on top.

http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse443-s12/docs/ch6.pdf

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Karger-et-al-A... (See Layering and Assurance sections especially. Compare to QA practices of favorite FLOSS VM.)

http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec04/tech/wips/wips/04... (Nizza uses FLOSS components. This document is just great at describing the architecture they and the proprietary vendors were using with separation kernels. The proprietary offerings contained a lot of problems FLOSS didn't with their 4-12kloc kernels having less code to screw up. User-mode drivers can boost reliability a bit, too.)

>Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code.

>This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

Quite a few of the things listed in the article are not open source (some of the map stuff, as an example). Last I checked (several years ago), we only have DuckDuckGo's word for it.

I think the idea is not that these are all trustworthy services, but that no single company has all the data on you.

"Look at the code" is an anachronistic strategy.

Nowadays, very little of our data solely relies on our own devices, and most of the value of consumer software occurs when data is being transmitted between systems. When your data lives in the cloud, there is almost always a side-channel way to get at your private data that won't be visible in any Git repository: Just go look at it directly.

Meaning that, nowadays, if we're to live any sort of non-Luddite, Internet connected lifestyle, all we have to go on with anybody is their word. If I limited myself to services where inspecting the source code would give me what I need to know about how well my privacy will be protected, without trusting the word of any third parties, then I'd have to let go of email, telephone, and credit and debit cards (and banking in general). Plenty of other things, too, but I think those three paint the picture well enough.

This isn't true. You can use disassembly tools to trace through code, and you can see what imports/exports there are, as well as what API calls are being made using static analysis tools.

You can also use all sorts of runtime tools to see what a binary is doing at runtime, so I imagine it would be pretty easy to see if an application is phoning home, and where home is located, although the data is probably encrypted.

In fact, it might actually be easier for an end user to audit a binary using such automated tools instead of looking at the source code itself. At least with the automated tools, the tools can flag suspicious constructs in the binary that may indicate that it's up to no good, and do so in a way that is more understandable to the end user.

I thought it was strange bing was not mentioned, even though it has Mozilla's endorsement of having a better privacy policy than Google[0] and is probably the most popular alternative to search in the United States. This far from a complete list of Google alternatives.

[0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing...

As much as I like Microsoft, Bing is awful. Ive used it, and I tried to like it. It can't find anything.

I find bing to be better than any other Google alternatives.

agree

It would be possible for you and your parent comment to be correct simultaneously.

Bing's video search (particularly for porn) is the best in the business.

Its image search is also pretty good. If I'm not successful on a google image search, bing usually comes up with quality images. Their maps also tend to better render local businesses and it's easier to navigate the results than google, surprisingly. On the other hand technical searches are way better on google.

> (particularly for porn)

I had not considered Bing a serious competitor to Google's search engine until now.

>> (particularly for porn)

> I had not considered Bing a serious competitor to Google's search engine until now.

I can’t tell how much humor was intended here, but that’s a serious competitive point that had not occurred to me. Ever. It’s not something that MS could use in a marketing campaign, but could easily sway lots of people to give it a try when they otherwise wouldn’t.

I'm not sure if it was implemented as a 'competitive point' or if Microsoft just has employees that solved the porn search problem for personal use.

That’s likely on purpose now, even if it was accidental in the beginning. Microsoft marketing people are not stupid, and they know the right amount of piracy and the right amount of porn is excellent marketing.

I use Bing a fair amount and I like it.

I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what sorts of things you are trying to find and having trouble with. Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions for how to get more out of your Bing experience.

I've tried switching to it but for looking up code and projects it kinda sucks. Even when I throw hints at it sometimes it just doesn't seem to care. I'm using DuckDuckGo instead for now.

It’s a matter of taste but I prefer the Apple/google clean and white UI with little else distraction than what you are trying to achieve over Microsoft’s “portal from the 90’s/let’s fill every bit of space”. Whether it’s bing or Windows, something as stupid as showing you a different background picture every time means you always have to deal with a new visual, which means more effort to find your way. It’s the same for IE and edge, the default new tab is to show you a busy page with news, weather forecast, most visited stuff. That’s like advertising banners to me.

I’m surprised to learn an it professional regularly finds their way to a search engine home page. I would assume you’d just type your query directly into the address bar? This seems to work for every major browser at least, unless I’m mistaking?

I actually use Bing, and I see the oddity that is their homepage once a month, if that.

(And I think bing is fine for about 80% of searches. The rest I use google, which manages for another 10%, and for the remaining tithe I have to do something archaic like think about how to properly format a search query. Party like it’s 1999.)

Why are you going to Bing’s homepage? The rest of the site is minimalist.

It was also disappointing to hear recently one of their developers say that they mostly just copy what Google is doing to keep up.

I like/sometimes use Bing, and it's decent, but it's not significantly different than Google in terms of data collection. The biggest difference, arguably, is that they pay you for it via Bing Rewards.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing data and respects your privacy more, and probably the best choice for the privacy-conscious.

My primary goal of using Google alternatives is to deprive Alphabet of revenue. Privacy benefits are secondary.

Why do you want to deprive Alphabet of revenue, if not for their privacy-disrespecting business model?

Read a cyberpunk book. The mega-corp as focal point for resources, innovation and political clout is a scary thought.

Consider the almost exclusive dataset they have moated "everyone" else out of, and the long line of disingenuous/unethical business practices. The privacy considerations are the proverbial top of the iceberg.

Using Microsoft products to avoid feeding megacorps would be a strange strategy.

Most of the fictional dystopia center around a single mega-corp not mega-corps... Thus if you have 3 or 4 Mega Corps that would be preferred to a single monopolistic Mega-Corp.

Do you have any book recommendations?

Dune's CHOAM corporation is a great example. Ownership in choam is synonyms with power and wealth. All political maneuvering is based on gaining or keeping control in choam corporation.

For "receiving end" perspectives, watch Blade Runner (the old one) or Altered Carbon. The Expanse probbly qualifies too. For books, Peter Hamilton incorporates different mega-corps in his universe but it's not the main object. Special mention to the Void Trilogy's Commonwealth.

The Expanse's high-political scene is best described by the balance of powerful sovereigns, and how that changes over time. Companies have a lot of power, but that power is primarily expressed by influence in governments. A company gets mining rights from a U.N. charter by influence. Then the company expects the U.N. military to defend those mining rights. Sometimes the company influences the goverment and sometimes the goverment influences the company. The big exception to this is the O.P.A. which always tends centralize power around Tycho.

Altered Carbon also uses goverment as the primary seat of power. United Nations Envoy Corps are primarily a reskinning of Dune's Sardaukar, the powerful super soldiers that enforce the rule of law out of fear. There are very powerful corporations, especially those discussed in the first book, but their power is again through the influence of government, and goverment has the authority to act independently.

This is in comparison to a true mega-corp like Final Fantasy 7's Shinra Corporation, where all power exists within the company. Shinra can destroy 1/8th of the capitol city with no repercussions, and there is no significant economic activity outside of the company.

I wouldn't throw someone into the deep end of corporatism based on where this thread started ;) I figured the implicitness of my examples' corps' power fits better as an illustration of the potential short term future.

Yours is a terrifying endgame, but it feels (to me) quite far removed from what we should look out for before it's too late.

Alphabet has several projects that Microsoft does not have a counter-project for and in which my primary ethical concerns are not privacy related.

I'm specifically concerned about their approaches and attitudes on AI and Life Sciences.

That was in 2009 - Windows 10 probably wasn't even a project at that point, for instance.

I doubt Mozilla would recommend Bing over Google again because it's more "pro-privacy."

I think the point is not so much pro vs anti privacy. On the web you have to assume every site is anti privacy, and you may have some rare pleasant surprises. To me the point is rather to spread that trail of data among multiple providers that are not known to sync their data.

Apple iCloud privacy policy mirrors Google's. You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. Apple also regularly gives iCloud data dumps to US government (they approved and delivered data in about 80% of US Government requests in 2017: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-trans... )

(The exceptions here are iMessage and phone backups which are E2E encrypted.)

> You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud.

This seems so deliberately wrong that I shouldn’t respond, but I will. Quick and easy synchronization of contacts, calendars, and photos are all features that I appreciate. What’s more, my fearful-of-technology brother tells me how useful they are to him. He mentioned photo sync as a benefit only a few days ago.

"Gain nothing" ... over Google's superior features.

The OP was referring to iCloud vs. Google. Not the features of sync in general.

By "gain" they meant privacy. You gain no privacy... you lose privacy when using iCloud and Apple Calendar

You mentioned the exceptions - both of which didn't happen 5 years ago. Is it crazy to believe that we may have Tarnsap-like storage from Apple in a few years.

Side note: I don't think Apple will ever encrypt iCloud iPhone backups because that would make it difficult to use them (how would you restore an iPhone backup to a new device if your old one was incinerated? Your private key would be gone)

Best I can tell, they already encrypt a whole load more and are ready to encrypt everything. When setting up a new iPhone, I’m asked to enter my Apple ID, password, approve via an existing device, provide 2FA and then provide the PIN or password of that existing device. After all that, access is granted. To me, this suggests they’re already encrypting in such a way that while it may be brute force-able, it’s unlikely to be data they can read by default.

>alternatives like Apple

I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs.

When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it.

Given all these experienced with Apple, to my eyes, Apple is no different than Google and I wouldn't trust any word of theirs as they've consistently been exposed time and again lying to consumers. So, I don't know where you got the idea of Apple being "entitled" to be in that list, but I'd say it's the right thing that they aren't.

>pro-privacy alternatives like Apple

I don't believe this. There is no evidence to support this as Apple runs on proprietary code. And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers. Ever wondered how Apple gets its data for its Apple maps? For all you know, they could be collecting your location information to build their database. Isn't that a privacy violation? I work in the Analytics industry, inside an iPhone, using Charles proxy, you'll be able to see random requests hit Apple's servers from time to time. For all you know, this could be info about you. You can't prove it nor disprove it.

I would never dare put all my trust into a single for-profit corporation whose sole goal is to maximize revenues and has been consistently exposed for unethical practices to its customers.

So, hope that answers why Apple isn't exactly a consideration.

[1] http://bgr.com/2017/12/28/iphone-battery-apple-apology-lette...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a...

[3] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/07/class-action-lawsuit-apple-wa...

>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers

Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as well be mud.

This article is about alternatives to Google on the basis of privacy. Isn't a company that doesn't base its core business model on mining your data an improvement for a vast majority of users?

Even if you don't inspect it personally, there's a greater community of people who don't get their paycheck from Apple who may be looking at the code.

Regarding the Intel comparison, you have no choice but to trust them, but by using Apple products, you are trusting Intel and Apple, which is worse than just trusting Intel.

> who may be looking

may be

This is called faith

I agree, though I prefer the word trust; I think in the end most security arguments basically move trust around between entities, so I would either trust the open-source community or Apple.

In this case I decided trust the open-source community more than Apple, since the incentives of people inspecting open-source code probably align better with my own interests than the incentives of Apple.

> the incentives of people inspecting open-source code probably align better with my own interests than the incentives of Apple.

The incentives of any people are: earn enough money for a peaceful existence.

When Heartbleed happened, it turned out that only a handful of people in the entire world have the expertise to do a full audit of the OpenSSL code. And their work is ridiculously expensive. And the audit didn't happen until someone paid for it [1] (I'm not entirely sure it ever completed [2]).

People may actually have less incentives to inspect open-source code because there's always the question of life, money, time, work-life balance etc. etc.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/ncc-group-to-audit-openssl-for...

[2] http://isopensslauditedyet.com

> I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple?

You shouldn't trust Intel either (see ME and all of the other negative-ring stuff that runs on their CPUs). But at the moment there isn't a strong alternative. AMD is somewhat better but still has similar issues. ARM is a mixed bag. RISC-V might save us but still isn't at the tape-out stage. OpenPOWER is possibly the only really usable option but software support is awful (if you've never had to deal with ppc64le bugs, you're lucky).

At least you have a reasonable alternative to Apple.

> doesn't...mining your data

This is my point. You simply don't know that. You have no idea what's happening on their servers. It's all proprietary. You have absolutely no evidence to claim that.

having the source code be open doesn't necessarily make it trustable, but it definitely has an added benefit. like op says, proprietary code is untrustable by design.

there is also the fact that I cannot take the code and compile it myself, proprietary solutions like the nvidia linux driver for example have given me headaches so many times, it would be nice if there was some form of entry to the code to at least get a vague idea of what the code is supposed to be doing. I basically have to pray for software to do what I want, when it doesn't the whole solution due to it's closedness/unadaptivity becomes useless to me.

What was the latest price of source code you inspected?

I know it's not exactly your point, but Etar is pretty nice, and apparently is cross-platform (Android & iOS - which I didn't know), and exists on F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/), Google Play (it seems somehow wrong to link to the Google Play Store given the context, but it's easy to find there anyway), and Apple's App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8). I think OsmAnd(~) [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/] is probably a better choice than Maps.Me.

Given that alternatives to Google products are largely services rather than software run locally on one's own machine, you're probably right about the partial orthogonality of FOSS here since it can be hard to verify that the remote server is in fact running the software it claims it is, and from a privacy-standpoint it may be somewhat irrelevant (I recall even the FSF said something of the sort).

There is a fork of maps.me on f-droid that strips out analytics/ads/proprietary bits. It's called omim (https://gitlab.com/axet/omim).

On F-Droid it's just called Maps though: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

I don't see that in the article. Search, email, drive, youtube, maps all have many non-FOSS entries.

I am fairly sure that no apple product is mentioned because replacing all the hardware one has just for more privacy is likely too extreme for many. Not to mention that one of the biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning, and apple does not make it easier at all.

> biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning

Very true. But there is no problem with apple, in fact Safari is first browser that is clearing cookies - ITP(2). I use uBlock Origin on Safari and Private browsing - no cookies at all.

Firefox has been able to clear cookies like that for years without any extensions.

Usind default settings or manually?

Neither. It's an option in the preferences.

Is that option enabled in default installation of firefox? Sorry, I must have specified that in Safari ITP is enabled by default, and this is important for non-tech people.

No. It hasn't been enabled by default in my experience. It isn't the exact same as the Safari technology. Firefox lets you block "3rd party cookies" or "all cookies" from the privacy pane of preferences. I've always "set it and forget it". The assumption is that many tracking cookies will come from 3rd party websites.

The default is 'allow everything'

You can change a setting to block third party cookies. This gets you similar treatment of cookies as was the default in safari 1-10.

Safari 11 still blocks third party cookies by default, but has 'Intelligent Tracking Protection' as an additional filter on top of it. ITP blocks/limits certain uses of first-party cookies.

Firefox has no analogous option. Either cookies are off, or all uses of first party cookies are allowed.

Firefox has an option to block all third party cookies in the manner similar to Safari 1-10's default behaviour. And like everything else, it lets you clear all cookies at once, or manually look through the cookies to clear them.

It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.

What about the tracking prevention that Private Mode has had since FF 42 or so?

Firefox’s tracking protection is the same feature as Safari’s content blockers. [the defaults differ, though], and prevents specific listed domains from loading anything. Except when it turns out blocking them breaks too much. Like Youtube embeds.

Safari’s tracking prevention applies to things that do wind up getting loaded, and limits access to their own cookies/context. [kind of like loading all those embeds in seperate private sessions, even though they're on the same page]

> It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.

I never said that it did... I wrote that firefox has had the ability to block cookies automatically for years, which it has had. My response was not a comparison between the browsers but a statement of one particular feature that was mentioned. I simply said that what had been stated by the gp was also available in Firefox.

When you wrote 'like that', I assumed that you meant 'like that'.

> I simply said that what had been stated by the gp was also available in Firefox.

Given that the gp referred to ITP... no, it's not.

The gp has clarified their comment, since that time. Snark is beneath you.

By the time I posted anything, the post clearly referred ITP.

You were ignoring that nine hours later.

The clarification was to add ITP.

Disqus is over that way, if you want to keep arguing without a reason and without reading what others write.

I've been using startpage.com to search Google anonymously for the past year. Startpage proxies your query to google and back while leaving off the identifying metadata, making the query anonymous. At first you notice the slight increase in roundtrip time, but quickly get used to it. I find Google Search to have a better search engine than any alternative I've tried, so Startpage is right up my alley.

Apple is closed source, so we really don't know if they respect our privacy now, and in the future.

Also, they may work with the US government, even if they say otherwise, and people from both the US and other countries may not like that idea.

I don't disagree that Apple looks really good nowadays from a privacy perspective. They treat their customers with respect and don't sell their data.... until they do.

How can you trust a single point of failure to "do no evil"?

Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. All of the ML that apple does for example is done on-device or is privatized [0]. This goes for all of their services that Google has built their business off of: Messages, Siri, Maps, etc. People don't respect Apple's security because they trust Apple, they respect it because Apple has intentionally shot themselves in the foot if they wished to sell their data in the future.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...

> Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has.

Huh? Apple potentially has everything on the device, just as Microsoft does. Maybe they don't touch it, at least intentionally, out of respect (or just prudence). But if I recall correctly, they accidentally logged all Safari URLs for a while.

iPhone also sent geolocation coordinate files to Apple, until that was discovered. As you point out, there is a lot more than just the superficial concept of privacy, such as the Prism program that had/has a pipeline into Apple data. Like any large company, there are competing forces of strategically enforcing privacy and treating data in a way that doesn't respect privacy.

Chrome has search and url in the same bar, and therefore needs to log all urls you enter (and their metadata) for the sake of logging all searches. Absolutely benign, right?

Safari shares the same url/search bar, but I have not read their license. Would be pretty surprised if they are not logging all URLs.

Dude, google has been doing diff. privacy earlier than apple. Even now, their researchers( one of them the great Ian Goodfellow-inventor of GANs) is working on federated learning. Heck google had even open sourced their diff. privacy system. Apple just made a big deal put of it when they started diff privacy.

Well as Mark Zuckerberg put it during the congressional hearing—and this is a paraphrase—"we do not and have never sold data."

Which is true. They don't sell the data because they directly monetize it. Same with Google. Google didn't just start doing that one day, that's been their business model since they started doing ads. Apple's business model is selling users devices, which they would jeopardize if they tried to also sell their users' data.

There is a difference between privacy by charity and privacy by design

>Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps?

The "Maps (F Droid)" alternative suggested before the Maps.me app is a fork of Maps.Me that doesn't include any tracker/ad. It works pretty well although I've had a few issues logging into my OSM account and it takes a little too long to navigate "up" from a place search. It also features a GPS track recording function that Maps.Me lacks (AFAIK). It's really great and deserves more contributions!

But Apple services are still not privacy focused services and for most of them, you have to use an Apple device, which is still less than 10% of PC market and less than 30% of mobile one.

> Maps.Me

Has several useful functions like being able to pre-download specific countries or parts of specific countries.

Many mapping apps work offline but the way Maps.me lets you specifically pick & choose areas = more user friendly.

It uses Openstreetmaps which I've found to work amazingly well in areas where you wouldn't expect (it has off-road trails in remote areas of Vietnam for example)

via iTunes I can also import gpx tracks (or gpx converted to kml, I forget) for things like mountainbike routes, which works super well.

It's better to host your own content if you want to have a better chance at privacy.

You are seeing a problem where there is none. Etar is just a fork of Google Calendar, and you can find it in Play Store / F-Droid (which is linked from the mentioned GitHub page).

But then you have no protection against Apple, privacy wise.

I trust nothing I can not verify...

14M Users affected by Facebook Privacy Bug that makes Posts Public

Apple is a US based company. The point of this post is to try and hurt American hegemony in tech and promote European alternatives. Europe desperately needs it given a dangerously old population and increasing irrelevance of its tech industry, with GDPR being yet another populist nail in the coffin. Method of choice is thru soft power - swaying opinions on HN, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media.

I am on linux ... just tried Apple Maps - horrid ... it fails to permit location search by zip code ... just show the globe and let me zoom around - fail ... forced me to login - fail ... unable to enter arbitrary address - talk about slurping personal data ... unbelievably evil

What are you going on about? Apple Maps does all of those things, without asking for login information.

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