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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Though I think apples "pro privacy" stance is likely just a happy accident I tend to agree.

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.

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> Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy. One would have thought/hoped that they were tightly coupled.

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.

I'd argue that the GNU/Unix text interface is open, interoperable, and highly polished. The key ingredient is time.

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.

I would like to be that optimistic, but I am not. The PC has always been a fundamentally open platform and hardware has been supported by many OSes for a long time. When I was young, we would run MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.x (which was strictly spoken not an OS). After 1994 I also ran Linux and BSD and I never had any real problems hardware-wise. There was a difficult time around the turn of the century with WinModems and printers that only supported Windows. But that was more of a temporary regression.

I remember working hard for good graphics-card support and perpetually rolling my own kernels to support even year-old motherboards.

The biggest blocker in our experimental labs for open-source software was always hardware drivers. These days, linux is extremely common and generally well-supported.

I agree with you mostly, but I think the OS is there (Linux) we just need more mainstream Open Hardware, and hopefully Librem 5 will be the one to push things forward.

> Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy.]]

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.

Same here. Whenever I get caught up in some religious phone OS war I say I chose the platform I hate the least. I wish I could love my iPhone, but there are so many things wrong with it which could easily be solved without compromising anything product wise.

I'm asking this as a thought experiment, nothing personal.

What if, fixing things the way you like breaks these features for someone else?

What would having headphone jack break?

Two things:

1. There's really no space for it, if you look at teardowns. So something took its place.

2. It does give better water resistance. Google the water resistance tests between iPhones and others. The difference is night and day in real world performance.

1. No. Teardowns have shown nothing of that sort. It's a marketing decision to push people to buy $170 airpods. In fact, there's a very popular tech blogger's video where he successfully adds in a headphone jack[1] to his iPhone 8.

2. No. Samsung phones are far more water resistant than iPhones are with a jack on it. I would love to see your links to said research.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA

Re: water resistance – Sony is pretty good there too, but last time I plunged my phone, the headphone jack itself was acting up until it had dried out. I guess there's no way around that.

Edit: Oh, and when I broke my older model with saltwater, they replaced it. Twice.

> It's a marketing decision to push people to buy $170 airpods.

Earbuds that work with the iPhone come in the box (and prior to the just announced models even an adapter was included). I'm not sure how lack of a jack pushes someone to buy AirPods. Maybe it makes them think about buying bluetooth headphones over wired if they were already thinking about third party headphones? Maybe.

Also while you may disagree about the 'barometric vent', it was put in the space that the headphone jack would have taken.

As pictured above, you can see a piece of plastic sits behind the ingress protection (waterproofing!), right where the headphone jack would have been. And (update!) according to Apple it's a "barometric vent." Apparently adding all the waterproofing to the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus meant that it was more of a sealed box, and so to be able to have an accurate and working barometer, Apple used that space. The barometer is the thing that allows a phone to measure altitude, and Apple points out that on the iPhone 7 it can measure even minor changes like climbing a flight of stairs.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12941040/iphone-7-teardow...

I would rather have a headphone jack than a barometer.

You may disagree how the space was used, but I wanted to point out that it was in fact used. The poster I responded to said tear downs showed it not used. Even the video given as evidence showed the guy taking out the vent as the first step.

Wires are so last century. Bluetooth headphones have been available for at least 20 years. (I had a pair for my SonyEricsson m600c, and I'm not an early adopter.)

Knowing my altitude is something I need on at least a weekly basis. I'm OK with losing a port I haven't used in a couple of decades.

I don't want to have to charge my headphones or have them run out of battery.

And that's fine, but if you do anything active while wearing headphones, wireless is so much better. Even my cheap bluetooth headphones last 10 hours on a short charge (and tell me when they need to be recharged). I couldn't imagine going back to wires at the gym or while doing yard work. I do use a wired pair at my desk, but then why would I plug into my phone?

And AirPods? If you keep them in the case between uses they should always be charged.

Nice, and I'm not OK with that :) I have no intention of having another thing that requires recharging, I've already got my phone. Glad to see different people needing different features from a phone, though.

Out of curiosity, why do you frequently need to know your altitude? I don't think I've ever known my altitude except when driving past those "Welcome to Springdalevale, pop. 781. alt. 2,003 ft" signs you see when driving through small towns in mountainous areas.

> It's a marketing decision to push people to buy $170 airpods

FWIW, my lack of headphone jack had nothing to do with me buying $170 airpods. The product sells itself. It literally felt like something out of the future when it launched. Opening and closing the lid makes me happy on a daily basis. I can't think of a better use for that $170. It's a product that is pure joy to use, and completely eliminates one of the biggest annoyance factor in my daily life: tangled headphones, and worse, that feeling on your ears when you accidentally tug earbuds that are in your ear. So frustrating!

They cost $160, but you can use the included headphones without buying anything.

No. Teardowns have shown nothing of that sort. It's a marketing decision to push people to buy $170 airpods. In fact, there's a very popular tech blogger's video where he successfully adds in a headphone jack[1] to his iPhone 8.

How are people being "pushed" to buy Airpods when they can use any Bluetooth headphone, the headphones that come bundled with the phone, or use their own headphones with a $9.99 adapter that they have included up until yesterday?

Simple. There are multiple codecs in Bluetooth headphones, the most used one is proprietary aptX from Qualcomm. Apple has no problems licensing it for Macbooks and iMacs, but for iPhones they chose to reject Qualcomm, do their thing, and use AAC codec, which is supported only by small fraction of wireless headphones. https://darko.audio/2017/12/how-to-enable-aptx-hd-bluetooth-...

So, if your headphones don't support AAC, they will (most likely) fallback to SBC encoding with a subpar sound quality. Don't want a subpar sound quality? Buy Airpods. Or Beats. Or some other overpriced thing that understands AAC. There was some 100 year-old industry standard regarding sound transmission, but apparently it's "obsolete" now, because Apple said so. And bundled headphones don't sound too good.

The removal of headphone jack was purely a political decision to spite Qualcomm and screwing over Apple's customers.

So now it’s a bad thing that Apple chose to support an industry standard (AAC) instead of a proprietary Qualcomm only protocol?

But if you aren’t satisfied with the Apple wired headphones, up until the 12th Apple bundle an adapter, you could choose any wired headphones you wanted. After the 12” it would be $9.99. It’s still not forcing you to buy AirPods.

As far as Bluetooth, there are other non Apple/Beats Bluetooth AAC headphones. Nothing forcing anyone to buy them from Apple.

>> 1. There's really no space for it, if you look at teardowns. So something took its place.

This guy was able to add the headphone jack back into an iPhone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA). The argument that there is really no space just isn't true.

…by ruining the Taptic Engine, if I recall correctly, or by spending thousands of dollars on getting this to work. It's not like Apple just left a hole in that spot out of spite.

People who have some kind of weird hate for Apple always assume that everything Apple does is out of spite.

Apple very rarely does things out of spite. And usually when that happens, it's a mistake rather than a conscious, malicious decision.

By breaking the seals that make the phone waterproof, removing a housing component, and breaking the Taptic Engine. He did nothing of the sort.

The S9 has a higher waterproof rating than the iPhone X.

That's why it's great if these thugs come with an [ON|OFF] switch. Let everyone decide what they use but start with secure as default.

It’s most often not features I want change but features I want to have in the first place: Proper PWAs, NFC, wireless charging (things Android has for an while now). Self signed apps.

Can you give some examples? Things being broken in life is usually one or more of:

- 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 :)

So, my single biggest daily aggravation: I turn off bluetooth/wifi frequently.[1]

There is no way to make the &%*#ing thing stop whining about lack of wifi - it literally waits until I'm trying to do something else to throw up a shitty dialog trying to annoy me into turning it on.

I turn connectivity off for a reason, and no, Apple does not know better in this instance. It is incredibly user-hostile and irritating, and I hope the engineer that wrote that code gets pink eye[2].

[1] I know, I'm a weirdo. Trying to explain how I'm Doing It Wrong will lead me to ignore you.

[2] I kid. It is really annoying, though.

Presumably, you're trying to do something that requires a network connection when it prompts you? If that's not a case the behavior is likely a bug.

I don't think you are doing it wrong but in 90% of the cases that's on the app developer. The OS usually doesn't ask for wifi randomly but many apps do. They check for connectivity and if wifi isn't available they prompt the user. It's not hard code to write but it shouldn't be used often. I'm actually writing similar code right now but for a pretty good reason, I'm working a feature that might use the presence of a wifi network to indicate proximity to an IoT device.

Under Settings > Wi-Fi, turn off “Ask to join networks”

Above all else, I can't develop for my own device without rebuilding weekly.

I can't run real Firefox.

I can't route all calls through Google Voice.

I can't run CarPlay without a head unit.

I can't open all map links in my preferred maps app.

I can't create restricted accounts for my kids.

It's essentially unusable as a "smart" phone.

Any claims about privacy fall apart after investigation. Google will still get my location on iOS if I use Google Search, exactly as it does on Android.

You can deny Google Search location services and iOS blocks far more tracking cookies than Android, so I don't think you can support that claims about privacy falling apart.

You can also disable location in Google Search on Android, in addition to switching to entirely different search providers and assistants. On Android, you can block tracking cookies in all apps, not just the web browser — without having to "jailbreak" your phone (relying on a rootable security vulnerability) or even unlock the bootloader.

For somebody who is seriously privacy-conscience, Android is strictly better.

All claims about privacy appear to stem from using fewer Google apps by default. Those default apps (like Safari and Siri) are inferior to their Google equivalents for most users, and for the people who don't want to give Google information, Android users can choose to use non-Google apps as well (like Firefox and local assistants and maps).

That's not at all were all the claims come from. You can block all ads without jailbreaking on iOS and iOS collections an order of magnitude less tracking data[0] than Android. Apple has pioneered the differential privacy algorithm's on top of that. Apple has a ton of features pointed at user privacy especially in the latest version of Safari. Android is in no way strictly better for privacy and saying so is irresponsible IMO.

[0] https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...

How has apple pioneered differential privacy. MS started it and Google has used ot before Apple ,even open sourced some portion of it,iirc. Google is also doing research in federated learning(ian goodfellow)

> You can block all ads without jailbreaking on iOS

You can't block ads across all apps without running your own ad-blocking proxy, jailbreaking, or paying Apple for the privilege of building an ad-blocking app on your phone. You can on Android by just installing an app (one example: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.blokada.alarm/).

> and iOS collections an order of magnitude less tracking data[0] than Android.

iOS collects the same data that Android collects. The difference is how much data the default apps collect that go to Google as I stated earlier. The Google apps are strictly better than the equivalent Apple apps for most users (maps, assistant, photos, mail, etc.). For the relatively fewer users who care more about privacy than about their apps doing things for them by knowing about them, Android has more and better options as well (Firefox, local apps, system-wide ad blocking, etc.).

> You can also disable location in Google Search on Android, in addition to switching to entirely different search providers and assistants.

Nope. Google was caught collecting location data even when everything was turned off:

https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...

They also made their settings very misleading: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/13/17684660/google-turn-off-...

Your second link is about data collection that Google apps also do on iPhones. It doesn't happen if you use a different search provider or disable sending your location for Google searches, as I stated and you quoted.

Your first link is about accidental collection that no longer occurs according to the article.

> I can't develop for my own device without rebuilding weekly.

Well, unless you pay, or use Swift Playgrounds.

> I can't create restricted accounts for my kids.

Does the standard set of restrictions not do what you want?

> Google will still get my location on iOS if I use Google Search, exactly as it does on Android.

You don't have to use Google…

> Does the standard set of restrictions not do what you want?

Separate accounts have separate data, not just restrictions.

> You don't have to use Google…

That's the point.

>I can't route all calls through Google Voice.

This is on Google now. Apple provides ways for app developers to use the native phone UI now. If I set up my number with the Google Hangouts app, I can get calls from my Google Voice number via the Voice app or the native UI. You can't do this with the Google Voice app but I have a feeling that's because they haven't updated it to support this API.

I'm talking about calling out, not receiving calls, which doesn't require any support from the phone as Google Voice can forward to any phone number.

What do you mean you can’t call out on a Google Voice? You open the app and make the call.

If Google Voice has Siri integration which has been around for awhile, you can say “Call X using Google Voice” and it will call using GV and activate the phone Bluetooth protocol if you are connected to your car’s Bluetooth system.

I mean click on a phone number in my contacts app or on a web page and have the call go through Google Voice or dial in my default phone app and have the call go through Google Voice.

And it’s somehow harder to go to the Google Voice app and call especially when you can import your contacts?

What’s the fundamental difference between clicking on Contacts and making a call and clicking on the GV app?

If the GV app has been updated to take advantage of the latest APIs, calls to and from the GV app will show up in your call history along with the native dialer.

If you like GV, why use the native contacts app at all? Any app that adds to contacts will automaticallly be added to GV.

You entirely ignored the part about clicking on phone numbers in web pages. It's the same with any app. I should be able to use whichever contacts app I like, whether it is a unified contacts app, my LinkedIn contacts, my Facebook contacts, the maps application, etc. Any time I click a phone number to make a call, it should appear to come from my Google Voice number. Copying and pasting is horrible experience just to make a call.

Blame that on Google. If you use Chrome on iOS, they already give you a choice of which maps app to use and which mail client to use. There is no reason they couldn’t give you the choice of how to handle Tel links.

If Google wanted to since they already have all of the apps, you could completely stay in the Google ecosystem on iOS - Browser, mail client, google voice, etc.

I should be able to do it from any app as I stated earlier (not just Google's) just as I can on Android.

And have all of the security issues that go along with it....

https://gkbrk.com/2017/05/android-dialer-packets/

You're grasping for excuses. There are security issues with running any app on your phone. A maps app could do nefarious things with your location. A browser app could do nefarious things with your browse history. That doesn't mean Apple blocks all third party apps.

If I trust a phone app enough to use its dialer, I should be able to route all calls through it. If I trust a maps app enough to use it manually, I should be able to set it to open for all address links. It really is that simple.

All valid point and I would add ignorance to it. They simply don’t know or care.

I file radars when applicable, my gripes are more general:

- No universal 3D Touch puts it in a weird spot. I like 3D Touch! Why not say we equip all models with 3D Touch, similar to when they made ips display the standard even for entry level MacBooks.

-prohibiting self signed applications. You have all the right to keep Steam Link off your shop, but not off my device. And if I had the desire to install Alex Jones’ app I would like to do that. You’re not my mom Apple. I’m still hoping the EU will fix this at some point.

-iTunes. I use it. It’s awful. If they would at least kill it off I’d know not to use it anymore.

-Seriously lagging behind in standards like PWAs, wireless charging or NFC.

-iMessage and Airdrop are awesome. Too bad I can rarely use them because the majority around me use Android.

Have you looked into CopperheadOS[1]? I would like to hear your thoughts on it. They even have a store where you can buy Pixel phones flashed with CopperheadOS. They're a bit pricey though ($1000+). I personally would rather flash it myself to save some money.

[1] https://copperhead.co

CopperheadOS is a very questionable choice these days. The author lost control of the company and was booted by the business tool.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/8qdnn3/goodby...

Anything new on that front that you have heard? I remember the meltdown but haven't heard anything since. Looks like the business guy is just continuing to sell what they had and then no updates ever. Once people get sick of that, maybe the company just goes away?

No clue. As I understand it, the author destroyed the signing keys, so updates aren't even possible. A fresh build with new signing keys would need to be flashed out of band.

The original author stated his intent to fork and resume the project under a new name and with a new device set, but probably still the Pixel line.

Didn't the license prevent forks?

I think he claims he owns the copyright; if that's true, the license doesn't apply to him.

That's a bold claim when he was being paid a salary to work on it.

Was he? His claim is: "I have never had any employment agreement, copyright agreement, licensing agreement, NDA or even work contracts with Copperhead. There was a mutual understanding that I owned the code I was writing."

I can't think of a context where a judge looks at a salaried CTO commiting code to repositories with the same name as the company, in inarguably the core domain of the company, and shipped in the name of the company by said CTO, with nothing written down to the contrary and goes "oh yeah, that's totally his code, not the company's".

I think Daniel's in the process of learning that verbal agreements don't mean anything when the shit hits the fan. IMO that's what he gets for switching to a non copyleft license.

Work for hire doctrine says he has aa very poor argument.

Work for hire is a statutorily defined term (17 U.S.C. § 101), so a work for hire is not created merely because parties to an agreement state that the work is a work for hire. It is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally recognized author of that work. According to copyright law in the United States and certain other copyright jurisdictions, if a work is "made for hire", the employer—not the employee—is considered the legal author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

Copperhead is a great idea! Biggest issues I had with it when I was looking at it was, lack of recent up to date hardware. The Pixel was a great phone but it's getting to be a pretty old phone, the pixel 3 will be out soon. Second and much bigger issue is the lack of apps because SO many Android apps require the google play services and if you enable that you lose the vast majority of the privacy benefits you gain from Copperhead and fdroid. If you don't use apps or just a few that support fdroid, then Copperhead might be a great choice.

"The Pixel was a great phone but it's getting to be a pretty old phone"

How so? I just upgraded to a Pixel 2 XL from a phone much older than the pixel, a Nexus 6. I would not have even upgraded so soon if I didnt up with one too many crack on my screen when it gave up.

> SO many Android apps require the google play services

It depends on definition of 'require'. Almost all apps 'require' it in app manifest file. But very many of them actually works perfectly fine with an absense of Google Play Services on device.

I made an alternative to CopperheadOS after it fell apart for those interested: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack. Rather than providing random binaries of an OS to install on your phone, I've gone the route of creating a cross platform tool, rattlesnakeos-stack, that provisions all of the AWS infrastructure needed to continuously build your own personal RattlesnakeOS, with your own signing keys, and your own OTA updates. It uses AWS Lambda to provision EC2 Spot Instances that build RattlesnakeOS and upload artifacts to S3. Resulting OS builds are configured to receive over the air updates from this environment.

That's very cool! It's a shame that I'm unlikely to own a Pixel device any time soon, but for those who do this looks really interesting.

I am a senior app developer and I love some of the features that come with a smartphone (google photos often feels like magic) but I have got to admit, I am tempted to just dump my personal phone and only have one in a drawer to work on.

Yea, I'm thinking of ditching my sim card or living mostly in airplane mode with wifi. I don't want to be part of a system where even the cell phone carriers are selling my real time location.

You do realize location tracking via wifi broadcasts (not even AP association!) is a thing, right?

http://digitalmortar.com/overview-in-store-tracking-technolo...

You'll be part of the system as long as you have a phone.

(...and as long as you have a face, if projections are to be believed.)

Yea, it's pretty awful. Beyond that you also have to trust that the phone is doing what it says (not broadcasting wifi beacons when wifi is off). A faraday caged messenger bag has been on my list for stuff to make. I've also been trying to think of an acceptable mask to wear in public and I saw someone on my train home with a mirrored face visor. [1] No time soon, but good to keep in mind. License plates are pretty bad too, photography in public is legal, so anyone could set up a dense enough camera network and track you everywhere you go via license plate. The most obvious case would be governments processing the video / images from cameras on traffic lights.

1. https://www.amazon.com/_/dp/B073WB4KSF

> Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy

Huh? Isn't Linux (the original one, not derivates like Android) relatively private, while being completely open?

Sure, but on any decent phone, the only Linux you're going to get is Android.

What's wrong with openness of Android flavour of Linux, called AOSP? Yes, the hardware drivers are mostly binary blobs, but there are many binary blob drivers for PC and other hardware on Linux.

puri.sm Librem5 .. almost there.

I think the parent was implicitly referring to smartphone platforms. Certainly Linux is both the most open and most private option for general computing, which is probably why the parent was lamenting the fact that privacy and openness (in smartphones) are not tightly coupled.

Android itself is "open", but if you want to do much with it, you want it with Google Apps.

If by 'to do much with it' you mean asking the weather by voice, then yes. Otherwise, F-Droid provides open-source alternatives for many apps, and then many apps from Google Play Market actually work fine without Google Play Services.

"As it is today I can not buy a phone without having a deep bottomless disdain for it."

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.

> Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy.

That's a terribly wrong dichotomie

What are you proposing as the real-world alternative?

It's true for smartphones. If you choose privacy AND open source then you're either making sacrifices or doing something "hacky". Most people want to have their mainstream apps available and don't want to learn how to install a new OS on an Android phone.

...but those who do get more privacy than those who try to buy their privacy from Apple. In other words, Apple is an option for those who a) don't want to learn and don't have access to someone who can do the job for them, who b) trust Apple when they say they will guard their privacy and c) can afford to make these choices.

By the way, the time when installing an alternative Android distribution on your phone was 'hacky' is past for many devices, several distributions offer OTA updates so it is perfectly possible to run a mostly-open device without ever having to do anything 'hackish'.

As to whether an always-on radio beacon transmitting your location to the authorities can ever be seen as a plus in a privacy context remains to be seen of course, that is something which can not be fixed by either AOSP or Apple.

I.e., you wall yourself into your own garden that you aren't conceivably going to want to maintain and that no one cares to build apps for.

iOS and Android are the choices. I say pick your poison. If a new choice comes along, I don't see any reason for the dynamics to be any different. People want high quality well-integrated electronics, and you only get that by being beholden to the manufacturer.

> Either you choose a somewhat open platform, or you choose privacy

Those who would give up essential Openness, to purchase a little temporary Privacy, deserve neither Openness nor Privacy. -Benjamin Franklin

I think it's a strong selling point they repeat for last 3 years on every chance they get. Like how everything is done on device, encryption, nothing is stored on cloud and so on.

There's nothing on the market now that I'd actually like to buy.

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).

iOS has fantastic support for ad blockers and network proxies that make it INCREDIBLY easy to block outgoing connections. In my experience it works far better than Androids version of that.

Face tracking for faceId you can turn off but I agree it can be creepy. So far it's been limited to only on the device and encrypted so I've been ok with it but that's obviously a very personal choice.

Could you please provide an example of these proxies that one could use to block outgoing connections? I'm only aware of Ad-blockers that do so for incoming ones.

The only solution I have found is to run an OpenVPN server at home and stay connected to it constantly. I lose a microscopically-minuscule amount of battery life, and a few percentage points of WAN throughput but it is worth it.

I then have content rules on the firewall between the OpenVPN server and the Internet.

As an added benefit, this makes the monitoring done by all cellphone providers (not just Verizon!) irrelevant because all they see is a constant, 24x7 stream of encrypted traffic to the same IP address.

Not OP, but Charles Proxy came to mind: https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/ios/

I think it's come up here a few times, with various anecdotes about surfacing badly behaving apps.

Charles is the one I use but there are several in the App Store.

As said down chat Charles Proxy is the one that I use, mostly because I've used it on macOS for years and trust the developer. It works great and has turned up SO many apps doing gross things. There are others in the store but I've never personally used them.

Charles: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/charles-proxy/id1134218562?m...

Another that I have heard of but not used (your milage may vary and all that): Alice https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alice-network-proxy-utility/...

You can also run a proxy on a server remotely and intercept all the network calls from your phone, something burp is common in the security industry. It's under your network settings, HTTP Proxy. It's more limited than an app like Charles that inspects all traffic but it's another option.

Unfortunately Apple seems to have taken a couple steps back from supporting good ad-blocking tools. They forced AdGuard to cripple their iOS app to only allow DNS-based blocking instead of the superior local VPN blocking.

You don't need an "app" to support VPNs. All they do is make set up somewhat simpler. iOS has built in support for VPNs. Once you have the configuration information, you can set it up yourself from settings.

VPN is maybe the wrong word. He's talking about running deep packet inspection locally, which is possible on Android, instead of on a dedicated VPN server.

It's also possible on iOS, a couple of Proxy apps do so.

Which?

There are some useful products but I wouldn't call it fantastic compared with my experiences on Android, e.g. where I can root the device and use a hosts file for system-wide blocking. VPN options are good there too, in my experience, though this may be another case of personal preference.

Adguard works rather well, but Apple doesn't seem too keen on their product:

https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-pro-discontinued/

Of course, there's ad blocking in Safari but tracker blocking in apps also concerns me.

As for the FaceID I would indeed turn it off and use a PIN, but it would be a bit of a faff; a fingerprint plus a means to quickly turn that off is quite convenient.

FaceID does not scan a user's face.

Upon enrollment, the phone illuminates your face with a grid of dots, and creates a three dimensional depth map of your face from multiple angles.

The results of that are stored in the secure enclave, and when an unlock is requested the device re-scans the face that is in front of it. If the two maps match "close enough" the phone is unlocked.

You cannot recreate a face from the data, and the phone has no idea what you look like unless you actually look like this in real life: https://i.imgur.com/fNBiIUU.jpg

If you're worried about the very low resolution biometric map of your face being used to impersonate you, that can already be accomplished with just a couple of seconds of video, or a photograph and the only known defense against that is never venturing outside a secure perimeter into which camera lenses cannot see.

That face scan is on-device. And you can turn that off.

> Though I think apples "pro privacy" stance is likely just a happy accident I tend to agree.

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.

I think his point about the "happy accident" is that iAds failed and that's part of why Apple is now "pro privacy."

This seems backwards though. iAds failed because Apple was pro-privacy - iAds targeting features essentially didn't exist because they didn't collect any data.

Yep, the saying is generally that if you don't pay for something, you're the product.

But I've noticed that more and more, even when you do pay for something there's a good chance your data will still get sold.

Yep. See also: Every credit card transaction you make.

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