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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

I just love the apple response mail to the guy who disclosed this to them:

"We have forwarded your feedback to the appropriate team. Someone from that team will investigate and follow up as needed with the developer.

Because we can only share communications about an app with its developer, you will not receive updates about this matter."

It's the perfect email, they can do whatever they want, and they have an excuse why they don't need to account for it - they could let the app do whatever it want, demand it to change it's behavior or throw it out, but the one who spent considerable time researching this would never know.

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Apple's lack of transparency is one of my biggest problems with them. I refuse to ever file bugs with them since I know I won't get any meaningful updates.

Similarly, I often report problems on Google Maps since they actually send email updates about your report and tell you when it's fixed, whereas I never do with Apple Maps since they don't provide any feedback.

> I refuse to ever file bugs with them since I know I won't get any meaningful updates.

Having your bug get fixed is perhaps the most meaningful update possible, and that's the one you'll never get if you don't file bugs.

I get your pain, I really do. I've filed many hundreds of bug reports with Apple. And many of those never got updates, or (more often) got a single update telling me it's a duplicate. It sucks to spend a bunch of time compiling a bug report only to be told that it's a duplicate.

But many of the bugs actually got real feedback, and many of them got fixed. Sure, if I hadn't filed those bugs, maybe someone else would, so some of those would have gotten fixed anyway, but maybe not as fast, and a bunch of them probably wouldn't have been fixed at all simply because most people don't get around to filing bug reports.

The perception of radar outside the company is definitely something they are aware of. Like everything else associated with the system, they aren't very transparent about what they are planning to do to fix it long-term ;-)

However, internally they use that bug tracker for everything. If it isn't in there as a bug, it likely isn't on the "radar" to be fixed.

BTW, it is unfortunate they don't make public views of bugs available (a la openradar) but if you have an issue impacting you marked as a duplicate, it is not closed. You can both amend your issue with new information and you can request updates on the status of the primary bug.

Worse. I've filed bugs with Apple, and then upon discussing them on Apple public lists, get accused of violating my NDA. As if reporting the bug makes the bug subject to secrecy. IANAL but if that's really true, then yeah, why bother filing bugs?

Apple Maps provides exactly the same feedback on user corrections. Try it out.

Nice, they must have added that since launch. I tried providing feedback years ago when it was still new and the feedback seemed to go into a black hole.

Indeed, I’m impressed the speed in which Apple maps updates happen and they send notifications when they have made an update based on your feedback.

I started providing more feedback on poor routing, incorrect entrances, etc. precisely because I got feedback my effort was working.

I can't get the video links in the tweet [1] to open? Unless I fat-fingered all 3 of them. Either the guy doesn't want to be accused of not following proper disclosure procedures, or he was somehow asked to remove them?

[1] https://twitter.com/privacyis1st/status/1038103142460743681

Are you typing uppercase-I or lowercase-L? I just typed in the first URL and it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVEI-BaSVU8

That is why people need to use the court of public opinion in such matters.

The court of public opinion is fickle, loves to conduct witch hunts, is easily swayed by lies, and is mostly just a reflection of the biases of the participants.

What court isn't? Even a single real judge is biased, and will judge the same case differently according to what time of the day it is, or if their favorite sports-team is on a winning or losing strike[1].

The power of the court of public opinion is, that everything (hopefully) gets revealed instead of being confined to the opinion of a few select.

[1]: This is mentioned in Hello World by Hannah Fry[2]

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38212157-hello-world

They could have sent you an email that says nothing, is that preferable about one that communicates what they're really going to do?

That they could act in an even worse manner doesn't make the policy any better. Nice that they gave Privacy 1st a "receipt". Would be better if they had some conclusion to provide.

I can think of lots of ways that the policy could be better, but that's not the point I was bringing up... I was pointing out that this sort of complaint is why most corporations say basically nothing in these kinds of emails.

Ahh, fair enough. I get what you're saying. A non-existent reply can't be analyzed at all, whereas their limited acknowledgement is a "thing" that can be criticized. Basically, why even bother to give critics an artifact to coalesce their criticism around? At least Apple is being upfront with their policy, instead of ghosting on the reporting party.

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