Apple's best product is now privacy
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
In the last few years the combined privacy invasion from:
1. Google at the very heart of Android (and even Cyanogen/LineageOS with DNS, Google Play Services etc.) and everything I do on the phone. 2. OnePlus with sending data and telemetry back to China and being caught out multiple times after saying they respect the user. 3. Facebook with asking for/getting insane levels of permissions from Android for their apps.
Has made me realise that Apple are the only option for anyone who cares about privacy and wants some simplicity.
Sure I'd love for the ello (/e/) project to eventually take off and provide a real solution but in the meantime and for now Apple aren't showing any signs of wanting to (or needing to) exploit/sell my personal data.
I'm degooglifying as much as possible and my tech friends are too after the recent scandals. Google's a company we will look back on in 50 years as being a blight on freedom.
Which, is also the main argument of the OP for preferring Apple.
I'd guess that Apple really collects less data because they want to preserve your battery life, not your privacy.
1. Do they share this data with people?
2. Is this data anonymized?
3. Is this data directly monetized, or otherwise give incentives to violate user privacy?
- handled
- available for access by employees
- retained, deleted, and stored
etc.. are at least as important for your privacy.
As someone who works in security, I am as concerned or more about the seemingly inevitable breach's impact on my privacy.
So it is simple: Apple has a choice. Google doesn’t.
Where? I can't identify a single non-tech-oriented person in my life who makes phone purchasing decisions based off of vague notions like privacy.
In fact, I'd say that the market does not demand privacy, it is ambivalent to it. I don't agree with ambivalence, but I also don't see consumers making privacy-minded purchases, either.
Google was once the "don't be evil" company.
- does not use that data to sell stuff to you.
- don't have a reason to profile you and store those profiles constantly updated.
- don't have a reason to "follow" you across the web everywhere you go to update that profile.
Just having that profile on you makes a company a liability. C you trust a company that makes money solely based on the information they collect about you to make decisions that benefit you? or your privacy and security?
Why then use the app in the first place? I mean, the mobile sites of fb are pretty much functional to me. (Admittably, I am happy to have no notifications on my phone outside sms and calls)
There have been times when mbasic has shown me two items, and that's it. Switching to m returned more. But only going to the full www showed me everything going on.
So now I restrict myself to using Facebook just one day a week. It's not as good as cutting Facebook off entirely, but it at least reduces some of its data gathering on me.
I suspect it'd be trivial to remove the overlay with CSS.
People's will towards privacy is still weak, they don't know what those company could do with that amount of data. Ignorant, that's why those company keep doing what they do.
It's just like running a restaurant, as long as people can't see disgusting thing in their food, then everything will be fine and dandy, no matter how unhygienic the kitchen was.
Sad.
It boils down to trust. Do you trust Google? Do you trust Apple?
I trust Google to care very much about security. I also trust that they are gathering as much information as they can about me. Even as a paid customer. It’s baked into their business model.
I trust Apple to care very much about security. I also trust that they fundamentally believe in privacy and are not gathering large swaths of data about me, and are doing what they can to keep others from doing so if I play in their garden. It’s baked into their business model.
Why don't boil down even further? How comfortable you are when you put your own security on other people's hand? Do you trust others will protect you no matter what? Do you trust others will completely be honest with you no matter what?
I don't know about you, but for me, I always trying to figure out the detail of the thing that will be rely on, even it's just a door alarm. Only after that, I can then tell whether or not I trust it.
If I understand you correctly, I can say that your "trust" is actually a form of trade off: I want to use the awesome __________ Phone, so I can ______________. For that, I could take some shit from __________ as long as they don't ______________.
However, that just means you've convinced yourself to trust something, hardly anything else.
And speak of "business model", many company was cool and awesome when it's young. Things change.
So, if it's a question: Do you trust Google? Do you trust Apple? Both no. I kept my file encrypted when uploading to Google Drive, and I don't use iCloud at all. I have 16 different Google accounts and 3 Apple accounts, each for different things, and I replace most of then every two years (Or when Google start to ask me for my phone number).
My advise: Don't dip yourself into that situation when you have to make a choice like that.
So, given that I have to trust someone (and for 99% of people on the planet this is also true) I choose to trust Apple.
Currently I'm running with an MS Lumia 950 and when necessary, I'll switch back to Android. I've completely removed all my social media apps on both phones.
The most recent reason I needed to switch back to my OnePlus 2 was because my hockey manager now uses Venmo to accept payment for the upcoming season. I was pissed when I found out Venmo won't allow you to process payments from your desktop account anymore. You are forced to download and install the Android app, and then send money that way.
It just feels so invasive. I felt like they were saying, "We can't get the data we want on your PC, so we'll force you to download and install the app, and in the process, give us the permissions we want to get to your data.
Check out the comments here: https://www.xda-developers.com/e-google-free-lineageos-fork-...
I have high hopes for Librem 5 where privacy of user is the core product of the company.
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en
(No association.)
Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy. One would have thought/hoped that they were tightly coupled.
As it is today I can not buy a phone without having a deep bottomless disdain for it. Not the hardware but the software. And I don't even expect that much.
I have given up entirely, the slither of hope is that in the future we can decouple the smart in smart phone with the phone. A truly dumb phone that I can interface from another device, a device I have some control over that I don't have to sell my soul to.
I think this comes down to two things:
If we define "polish" as: consistency+predictable UX+aesthetics
1. openness involves interoperability, and polish is more expensive to achieve when interoperability is a requirement
2. the primary market for polish tends to value exclusivity, which—while not entirely contradictory to openness—tends towards non-openness
The combination of these two means that when you focus on polish you end up with a product line that is likely to be non-open.
The fact that the primary market for polish also tends to be economically comfortable also conveniently leads to margins that allow for privacy, but I think this is just a happy accident.
It's my belief that if we want a private + open platform we need to:
- Accept very large sacrifices* in polish because doing both is only economically viable when catering to a market that doesn't want/need openness
- Choose a different economic model where resources are available to do both simultaneously.
* Also worth noting that sacrificing quality and/or UX can lead to less privacy given that privacy depends on security and security depends on both quality, and also on UX to prevent social attacks.
Modern windowing systems are also very similar. A Windows 3.1 or early MacOS user would have no trouble using a computer today.
Touch and phone interfaces will get there, too, as both software and culture evolve together.
I can't wait for, and would love to support, the Debian of phone architectures. In past HN threads, it has been suggested to me that the real blocker for a good open phone OS is at the hardware/kernel level. That was the state of the hardware environment in the late nineties and early 2000s.
Give it time, effort, and support, and a great and open OS will emerge.
Sadly yes, which is why I backed the Librem 5 and hope it pans out, the promise of an open platform that respects your privacy is a really compelling one right now.
- lack of time to implement (this would be great but we have three people on a team, and five features to deliver...)
- lack of people who care enough and have the resources to fix it (this would be great, but manager has other priorities that are more important at the moment)
- conscious choice as expression of philosophy or style (like flat UI)
- conscious technical trade off (like on-device photo analysis)
What are some of the things you think are wrong and would be easy to solve? Openradar links would be useful too :)
What if, fixing things the way you like breaks these features for someone else?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/8qdnn3/goodby...
Huh? Isn't Linux (the original one, not derivates like Android) relatively private, while being completely open?
I feel the same way, but I don't feel negatively about it.
I have an iPhone and I treat it like a hostile/suspect device and that is working quite well for me.
Apple has no idea who I am - I have never even typed my own name into the phone. Apple doesn't even know my phone number as my "real" phone number is one I control and forward to the burner SIM (straighttalk) that is in the phone.
My actual phone provider (twilio) doesn't know who I am.
Straighttalk doesn't know who I am - they got an assumed name and email address. Same for the very, very few apps that I use.[1]
So unless Apple decides to acquire twilio and whatever verizon MVNO I am using this quarter and my credit card issuer, all they've got is Fakey McFakefake.
None of this was difficult, aside from building my own carrier inside twilio, but that was fun.
[1] Remember: VISA/MC do not verify names on purchases. The user interface strongly suggests that they do, but they do not - if you correctly enter your number/expiry/CVV/zipcode/etc., you can put in any old name you want. There is really no reason for any app to know your real name.
That's a terribly wrong dichotomie
Those who would give up essential Openness, to purchase a little temporary Privacy, deserve neither Openness nor Privacy. -Benjamin Franklin
Apple do seem to have some respect for privacy at the moment, but it's still a phone that scans the user's face (far too creepy for me) or makes it difficult to restrict outgoing connections (I'm not keen on apps connecting to flurry, facebook and so on).
Don’t underestimate the lure of ad money, even to a company as large as Apple. They realize the second you start taking ad money your customers are no longer your customers, but your product.
They also summarize the security of iCloud services, delineated by "in transit" and "on server", here: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202303
I wanted to actually call out one important detail in the latter link above: "iCloud secures your information by encrypting it when it's in transit, storing it in iCloud in an encrypted format, and using secure tokens for authentication. For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information, and only on devices where you’re signed into iCloud. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information."
So, we can discern that anything you store on iCloud that isn't using end-to-end encryption can be accessed by Apple. This includes (but is not limited to) Contacts, Photos, Notes, device Backups, and everything you're storing on iCloud Drive.
This article is solely about Apple making it harder for 3rd party apps and websites to track you. That's certainly a good thing, but the downside is that it just makes the data Apple has (or can have) far more valuable, which only increases the likelihood that they're collecting and selling a lot of data.
This article is just one guy speculating about his thoughts, and he was possibly paid to do it by Apple. If Apple wants to make privacy a selling point for their products, they would no doubt seize the opportunity to do so very loudly. And, if it's not Apple saying it, then it's not legally binding.
They have definitely been doing this over the past four or five years and certainly claim they aren't selling your data: https://www.apple.com/privacy/
"Whether you’re taking a photo, asking Siri a question, or getting directions, you can do it knowing that Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations."
That only applies to two things, taking a photo and asking Siri a question. It does not prohibit them from collecting the data for their own use. And does not prohibit them from selling analysis of that data.
https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/
> Your iOS device can collect analytics about your iOS device and any paired Apple Watch and send it to Apple for analysis. The collected information does not identify you personally and can be sent to Apple only with your explicit consent.
You have to opt in to analytics collection when you set up the device and in Settings>Privacy>Analytics>Analytics Data you can examine or download everything which has been sent to Apple.
If you take Apple at their word that they're only collecting what they say they are, they're not bad.
"When it’s collected, personal data is either not logged at all, removed from reports before they’re sent to Apple, or protected by techniques such as Differential Privacy."
And the fact that you can download the data unquestionably proves that it can be traced back to you. I think you're just seeing what you want to see, and aren't paying attention to all of the loopholes they create for themselves.
Not necessarily.
I think it is highly unlikely to come out that they are selling company data. Look at all the comments that Tim Cook made about Facebook - that he wouldn’t be in that situation as it would compromise his morals etc..
Does the GDPR not require this?
At the recent iPhone / Watch launch event a few days ago, Apple COO Jeff Williams stood on stage with a single word backdrop "Privacy" and said:
"At Apple we believe your personal information belongs to you, you should decide who you share your information with and who gets to see it. Period. All your (Watch) health and fitness data is encrypted on the device and in the cloud".
- https://youtu.be/wFTmQ27S7OQ?t=1673
That's not a legally binding statement from Apple stating exactly what they collect, but it certainly is Apple making privacy a selling point and doing so very loudly.
Answers to my questions why apple products are way more expensive, even compared to devices with similar features and hardware specs, remained pretty superficial "it's that way" or "apple is just better" weren't obviously satisfying. Blinded by my own conclusion that apple products just sell because of apple fanboyism I remained with google.
Now, in the year of 2018 were everyone is interested in your data im still pretty wishy-washy of getting an iPhone but recent news drive me towards it. But in the end it might be a decision between pest or cholera.
It obviously depends a lot on how much you care about software updates, how gently you treat your device, etc. But if you’re the sort of person who buys a new phone every two years and sells your old phone, the resale value of the old phone tends to be high enough that the costs look about the same as reasonably comparable domestically available devices.
If you’re buying your phone straight from China, or don’t care much about high-end phone features, your mileage may vary.
Or as many in this thread do, preach complicated (and often broken in practice) processes and tooling that might theoretically protect ones data, but require Stallman's PC levels of configuration and not actually get anything done while Apple's UX does.
The fact that (for the moment) the top comments are all software engineers giving up and advocating for dumbphones is a laughable abdication of responsibility/competence/design.
Most people aren't going to care about things until it effects them in some way.
> From the program, the Chinese SCS will be fully implemented starting in 2020 and will be made mandatory for every citizen. Once implemented, every citizen will be rewarded, or punished, on the basis of their behavior. Some types of punishments can be: flight ban, exclusion from private schools, slow internet connection, exclusion from high prestige work, exclusion from hotel, registration on a public blacklist.
(updated spelling)
So, Android devices sucks with privacy and cheap space to farming to other companies. Heard some Chinese companies sell phones with ad injections in default apps.
Network filtering isn't going to protect your privacy from anyone. If Apple (or Google) were really serious, they'd require app developers to have a privacy policy and have them post a bond in case they violate the policy. (They'd also need to audit every application backend to ensure that it's not sending data back to China.)
Nobody would write apps with this sort of policy in place... so here we are. If you really think the Chinese government is out to get you, which is a very real concern, I would not use any apps on your phone. The app developers do not care about your safety, and neither does Apple.
http://fortune.com/2018/09/01/apple-app-store-privacy-policy...
And having developers post a bond is logistically impossible to implement. Far better just to have Apple kick them off the store entirely. Which is what they do already.
It's quite amazing that Apple has not added this simple requirement to their app store until now.
Or if you're big enough like Uber, just get a firm warning and be told to stop doing whatever it is that's wrong.
A year and a half after their more privacy-conscious competition but good progress: https://www.iubenda.com/blog/privacy-policy-for-android-app/...
> And having developers post a bond is logistically impossible to implement.
Require a credit card at publisher signup. Explain it will be charged for violations.
I don't want to assume you're trolling, but this is literally the first time I've heard anyone ever say Google is more privacy conscious than Apple.
When you think of a toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities, you probably don't think of Apple either, even though its App Store infected more users with malware than all its competitors combined. https://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/09/malware-...
Don't need Chinese companies for that. When GDPR came into effect I received privacy policy msgs from adware (Foursquare) inside my standard Samsung Image Gallery. Not only Google, but Samsung as well is a horrible privacy nightmare.
Yep. I bought a cheap tablet off of Amazon with the only use for it needing to be able to read digital textbooks at close to their equivalent physical size. This was back when tablets larger than 7" were crazy expensive. This one wasn't.
It has so many ads injected into and between apps (full-screen popups on app change) that it's unusable for anything other than reading static content (which is luckily what I bought it for). Response time is on par with a 1st-gen Kindle.
I thought I'd be cute and implement DNS adblocking at the router level but that just causes crashes and hangs since they didn't see a need to implement a graceful failure mode for the ad callbacks.
With the more recent changes in Firefox, I find the UX acceptable and may go through switching back... I've got a few things on google but may migrate out.
It would be more accurate to say that Google Play sucks.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/
Cubot is a good example[1]:
"However, it was discovered that Cubot had removed the malware from the System UI package and hidden it under a new package, com.android.telephone, disguised as the phone dialer. On further digging, it was discovered that the new package does not have any real function and it manages to evade any detection by antivirus apps such as NetGuard, that would detect the malware under System UI previously."
The only thing they have is low prices.
The nice thing is they still give you drivers even to Windows 7.
When I get new Lenovo laptop, I immediately throw away their drive, put a bigger one and install Windows 7 from scratch.
At least for some time, this was not good enough. The shipped crap/spyware in the firmware and exploited Windows Platform Binary Table to inject their spyware into freshly installed Windows. So, even a clean disk and an official Windows CD didn't evade the spyware:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nas...
Luckily, desktop Linux/BSD is probably too obscure to be on their radar.
[1] https://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/xprivacylua6...
With XPrivacy you're able (or used to be able - I'm not sure if it works on recent Android versions) control things like how apps can use WebViews (e.g. what URLs they are allowed to open there), or whenever app is allowed to read or write (all separately) clipboard data. Etc etc.
https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy/blob/master/README.md
Most of these permissions either require individual consent after you run the app (and can be revoked in settings) or aren’t allowed under any circumstances.
The exceptions I see are:
Clipboard
Internet access (you can block cellular internet access on iOS and 3rd party keyboards can be blocked from allowing any network access)
Prevent links from opening in a view - depending on which type of web view that an app uses, the native content blocking framework that third party ad blockers use for Safari also work in the WebView. For instance, the ad blocker I have installed works with Feedly - my RSS reader.
The only sensor I think that can be blocked is the GPS.
PrivacyGuard in LineageOS is about blocking.
Also, have you really audited the code of xposed and xprivacy to see that there isn't any single security flaw that expose your whole phone?
I'm tired of the endless android situations where an app seems to be able to do whatever regardless of permissions... and permissions can't really be managed anyway. I also don't belive Google will ever get a handle on those permissions / privacy, they just don't care to.
It doesn't help that google killed the nexus line and now we have pixels that are premium priced anyway so I may as well consider Apple where I didn't before.
The camera is also a big deal to me so a lot of the "hey it's not a pixel but" options just don't do it for me.
Some it appears also does some dns trickery to disable ads in apps.
I say this as an old apple fanboy. The apple products are by far the best privacy wise, but I recommend against them anyway. I like Mac os, but feel I can't pay apple any more money.
I have repaired enough phones and computers to recommend people to not use apple. Unless you there is a class action lawsuit they won't extend warranty, even for obviously faulty products.
The last 2 years I have fixed more than 5 broken macbooks that Apple refused to fix for less than $400 with 10 minute solder jobs, and I'm just a hobbyist helping friends. Two of them were fixing issues that Apple had already "fixed" by doing what could be called the worst solder jobs of the century (one was actually just using a rubber pad to push a chip in place instead of doing a proper resolder. According to the guy linked later in this post this was apples official fix :( :( :( ...)
Don't take my word for it, though:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8&t=0s&index=3&list=...
I wouldn't go for those devices either. The Nexus 5 (not s. I don't know that one) is very easy to open and replace parts in (at least as far as phones go),but finding someone that can properly diagnose it and fix it can be hard.
I am not saying that andoid is all roses, but many devices are still realpairable even though things are going in the wrong direction.
When an iPhones warranty is up, apple has been trying their hardest to make fixing your device impossible.
If you break message encryption for the government, the incentive to mine or sell that data still exists for a profit-driven entity.
iPhone is certainly not a private device, just an order of magnitude less 'chatty' than google.
one for a game I play that I used facebook to log into. Makes sense.
1st edition advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I haven't mentioned Dungeons and dragons and haven't played it since the mid 1980s
Grindr aesthetics. I am hetero so I'm not sure what this is.
Indy Nostalgia. I live in Indiana so I guess that is somewhat relevant.
Hearthstone Australia. I live in Indiana and I don't play Hearthstone.
A few days ago I was talking about this with a friend and looked and facebook had suggested I join a group for progressive Asian-American Christians. I am not Asian-American or a Christian.
If this is the best they can do with 15 years worth of data then I don't think I have too much to worry about.
The data being collected about you is permanent. It can be combined with other data to shine spotlights into your life you thought were off limits forever.
The data can also be used to distort what really happened through careful editing of the record.
This is just beginning.
However, what they present to advertiser could be completely different, since that's where the money is.
Am I a minority, not being a serial shoe shopper? Or is whatever machine learning those companies are running really that simplistic?
That said, no, it's really that simplistic. Amazon will do the same thing for vacuum cleaners, and vacuum cleaner whales do not exist, as far as I know.
However, the overwhelming majority of Internet users don't use blockers, and are tracked wherever they go. Not just on the Internet, but in many places in real life too.
Now, having said all that, for the average grandma I would also recommend an iPhone. Android OS/play store/xda is still the wild west, and you can be compromised easier, if you don't know what you're doing.
Apple doesn't care about privacy, it cares about money and will continue playing this record from now on. The main reason why they did not go on the user data gathering/selling is mainly incompetence. They were just so far back in terms of user tracking that they just went 'fuck it, we'll consider this a feature now'.
Also, let's not forget they are part of PRISM (which they lied about).
Just wait for iphones to start declining in sales (and they will) and have the privacy talk again.
For now, let's talk again in a couple of years.. https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-looks-to-expand-advertisi...
But it seems like people are willing to pay a premium for privacy. So why can't Apple care about both?
Pandering to the security-minded doesn't scale well.
Edit: I guess maybe not in your country yet.
It is increasingly a bubble for the rich to super-elite not necessarily for the average citizen. http://time.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/
Furthermore, there are plenty of people who live near the poverty line that will be buying an iPhone XS Max this year. They deserve privacy just as much as anyone else, and if they're deciding between spending a disproportional amount of their income on an iPhone or the latest Galaxy Note, the correct advice in terms of privacy would still be "buy an iPhone."
Open source is very nice for tinkering, less so for security assurance. For the latter sound architecture is essential, and one can understand that without having the source for all the components.
With closed source, only employees get to see the code, their goals align with the company. Open source, anyone can see it and raise stink about things they don't like on behalf of all users. It only takes 1 person for all users to get the benefits.
Granted, open source doesn't prevent all privacy issues, MS still does telemetry in OSS projects, sometimes not even allowing to opt-out, and they just ignore the countless complaints, and enough people still use it. Such is the state of the world I guess. But imagine one day MS decides to say they're no longer collecting telemetry but they've actually put in some cleaver code that looks like it does one thing but actually sends telemetry data. Getting caught doing that would be a way bigger PR issue that would, hopefully, cause far more users to completely stop trusting them, even if all their code was open source. I don't expect companies that want to stay in business for long would attempt such a thing.
Even to prove things formally source is not that essential. One stil needs to know details how code is translated into the machine instructions. But then to show, for example, absence of code path that copies user location into network packet one may analize machine instructions.
Open software means that it can be audited by more than just the authors and/or owners.
It's not about this philosophical discussion that "you" haven't gone through every line of code yourself.
It's the difference between trusting one party of people who are keeping secrets from you, or trusting a diverse group of people who are not keeping secrets from you.
True, code audits are rare. But open source software is at least in principle verifiable.
That said there’s still blackbox hardware when it comes to the baseband. All devices which I’m aware of come with binary blobs for the baseband. So in that sense there’s no truly open mobile device.
Also, this [1]. They definitely do have tracking. Please point me to the source code for this.
nah. AOSP is actually a full OS. All the GUI stuff and whatnot is open source.
Apple only publishes the kernel sometimes. Not nearly as much.
> heavily based on FreeBSD
Not that heavily. There is a mix of Mach and various BSDs in there, but also a lot, a looooot of custom Apple weirdness on top.
Are you able to verify all of the closed source parts of Android -- not AOSP the actual Android implementation with Google closed source apps that most people use? What about the binary drivers?
I'm not going to take on the effort involved in manually installing my own firmware that'd been built from verified sources. You could argue that's simple laziness on my part, but, for the fast majority of people, they simply lack the ability to do otherwise. So, while I can read some version of the Android source code, I still can't be sure of exactly what code is actually running on my device. I have to place some trust in the vendor.
So, who would I rather trust: The company that took the risk of publicly standing up to the US Government over a privacy issue where even public opinion was at best only arguably on their side, and that boots 3rd parties off of its platform if they're caught trying to siphon users data without permission? Or the company that happily collaborates with surveillance states, makes most its revenue by engaging in surveillance capitalism, and encourages other companies to do the same?
That said, if anyone wants to see about bringing FirefoxOS back to life, that'd be cool.
You can do this with a free account, just with some restrictions on what types of API you can use.
That's the issue. You can't.
Can I buy an audiobook on the Audible app? No.
Can I buy a book/movie/show/etc on any Google Play app? No.
Am I willing to buy on websites or using a laptop or different advice instead of my phone because Apple? No.
One of the reasons I can stomach it is that while Apple is an enclosed garden they tend to use rather standard formats on things so you usually have a way of getting your data out should you leave the garden.
I find that more problematic with the Microsoft world which uses much more MS specific formats which are often binary or hellishly complex to decipher or reverse engineer.
At the moment the capabilities are being built in bits and pieces, like the frog being boiled, and once the capabilities are there they will be used and abused. You don't even need imagination to see this, even a basic acquaintance of human nature and history is enough.
The current generation of software folks have dropped the ball and sold out completely. There is a feeding frenzy of creepiness, stalking people accompanied with denial, apologism, dilution and posturing. If you are going to question the value of privacy or diminish the danger of surveillance you might as well question democracy and human rights. This is what apologism does, reduces discussion to basic first principles.
This is what greed and money does to people, and why regulations and rule of law is required to cement and reiterate the values a society subscribes to.
I haven't been this happy using a computer in a long, long time. Yes this MBP cost me about £800 more than an equivalent Dell or Lenovo but damnit it just works so well. There is no frustrating corner cutting like I found on so-called 'premium' laptops from Dell, Lenovo and Microsoft such as panels with backlight bleed, poor audio, wifi issues, etc.
It has been so good that today I did something I haven't done in over a decade. I pre-ordered an iPhone Xs Max. I don't have any real functionality issues with Android but I am happy to be getting away from Google.
Now I just need to find a reliable alternative to G Suite and I can be Google free!
When the market is already saturated with smartphones, the new features and technology in each new release have become incremental. Also it's easier to do much more with the software.
Adding more hardware in a already complex, miniaturized device is difficult and may take more than the 2 year cycle...
Proof that iPhones do not hinder the Chinese government one bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
They put on a big show about unlocking a phone for the FBI and all that, but I'm inclined to think it's all just theater to give people a false sense of security
My impression is that the vast majority of users don't care about privacy - no matter how much privacy apple adds to their product, it's becomes moot the moment you are active from facebook, or use google products - which practically everyone does.
- no background tasks, OneDrive experience sucks
- file system experience sucks, cannot save file in one app and open in another
- no alternative browsers
- no apps like Termux, or other emulators
It's a joke!
What are you going to do with this 'fastest processor'? Make photos of food for Instagram?
Completely false - there are many types of background tasks an app can perform.
> OneDrive experience sucks
Obviously this is subjective, but OneDrive can integrate at the file system level and be treated as a first-party file provider. If MS makes that suck, that’s not on apple.
> - file system experience sucks, cannot save file in one app and open in another
Also completely false. The Files app/framework includes not only locally created and managed files and iCloud, but also incorporates third party file storage like Dropbox and OneDrive.
> - no alternative browsers
Also false
> - no apps like Termux, or other emulators
Plenty of apps to get you on an SSH or serial terminal - Prompt and GetConsole are my gotos, but there are tons.
It really sounds like you read a list of half-true iOS complaints from 2010 and regurgitated them here.
1. navigate to a download link in browser, download the file
2. change file extension to zip, and unpack it to a folder
3. open one of the extracted .docx files and open in Word
4. save it as a PDF file
5. go to Mail app and attach the PDF file
Is the $1000 phone with the 'fastest processor of the market' capable to do this?
The notorious High Sierra proved more than enough that the macOS engineers develop __zero__ security in mind.
Testing the hypothesis: if that was true that all those new iPhone do not matter that much, Wall Street analysts would take a hard look at what is the gross margin of the Apple's new best product (privacy) and Apple stock price would take a serious hit.
Looking at the evidence: AAC stock price is super high
Alternative hypothesis: some people will buy Apple products for tribal reasons, no matter what the quality over price ratio is, and find a rationalization after the fact to justify it.
I’ve used a bunch of Android phones at work and a bunch of iPhones.
If you’re a hacker who wants to mess with their phone, want customisation, or don’t have more money, then an Android makes sense.
Other than that, buy an iPhone. You’ll spend more time getting things done, more things will “just work”, and it’ll break less often and have fewer bugs. The design is great, the aesthetics of the X are wonderful.
And then there’s privacy. Apple are hammering it because (a) Tim Cook sees it as a priority, for rather obvious reasons, and (b) it’s a competitive advantage that Google will never be able to counter unless they stop basing their business on adverts. Good. Let’s hope they hammer it more and more and force google to change. Android in its current spyware form is not a good thing.
Anyway in my opinion the biggest problem of smartphones by far is that we use them too much and mindlessly. The brand of the smartphone is mostly irrelevant, it's using it smartly that counts
I'm guessing a very small percentage of people do so but it's pretty helpful if you care about your privacy.
Apple hardware is nice, but also expensive. Further, a lack of options is a bad thing. Apple is now basically monopolist in the space of privacy-respecting smartphones.
Apple’s business model doesn’t rely on monetizing user data. Google, on the other hand, has a business model built around advertisers.
In other words, Apple has a choice when it comes to selling your data, Google doesn’t.
I’m not going to talk about Facebook because it’s just a website, like MySpace, and doesn’t sell hardware.
Since the new hardware announcements this week I'm scrambling to find a new iPhone SE to switch to from Android. I want privacy, but I also want a small phone with a proper headphone jack.
Maybe I'm being unnecessarily snarky, but is it really too much to ask for a business journalist to be able to tell the difference between a product and a feature?
https://www.verizonwireless.com/support/unique-identifier-he...
So who do you trust more with your personal data and why?
Full Disclosure: I work at the NSA
But more importantly, I come to HN to learn news or tools for programming. Less of this sponsored content and more "Show HN: Here's how I used computer vision to make a robot throw spoons only and specifically at my roommate, Tom."
How is it sponsored? HN is not just about programming, but if it's programming you need there are communities like Lobsters[1] which are heavily biased towards programming.
Privacy issues are always going to crop up in tech, and especially now more than ever with IoT devices and the proliferation of smartphones.
I am not sure we can trust them.
- Once upon a time, we all rallied around Google and it's "Don't be evil" mantra and Google seemed privacy-focused. Then that went away.
- Apple marketing is currently hyping privacy, but they still collect a staggering amount of telemetry from devices. They still hold a lot of our data that is not encrypted at rest. Some day, their touted stance on privacy will change.
Here's one data point which says otherwise [0].
> As insightful as it was, Apple's treasure trove of my personal data is a drop in the ocean to what social networks or search giants have on me
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
The targeted ads and (fake or not) news are not what's "threatening democracy". It's an ignorant populace that doesn't know how to evaluate credibility of news sources, or open themselves to multiple viewpoints (e.g., you can read Fox News and the NYTimes!)
Bad politicians were able to get elected long before the Internet came along.
Personally, I love the benefits of Google's ecosystem. It's handy. I use Facebook, but only for Messenger and events. I resist the urge to read the news on my feed. Apple's products are nice but Siri is garbage and I like the cloud.
The cringe train is arriving at the station.
> "When you pay that extra money for an Apple product, you’re not just buying better industrial design or more advanced underlying tech–you’re buying the right to keep more information about yourself to yourself."
All aboard the cringe train.
This article could have been written by a bot, instructed to talk favorably about Apple and privacy. Tech journos are funny when they expose their brand crushes.
We have the exact same tracking on iOS and Android
If you’re invasively tracking users, you should stop doing so.
Caused problems for almost every software where a patch was needed by the devs (namely docker, sure you could find more examples).
I actually had to reformat my drive because Disk Util.app on a APFS formatted drive could not handle bootcamp correctly on release and it foobared my entire drive.
To their credit they get it right when you give them some months and a userbase of millions of people. I simply wish they did all that before they actually publicly release their latest botch and enable it by default on every device.