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Comment by Spartan-S63 | Hacker News Reader

With all of these emerging privacy concerns, it reinforces my choice to move away from the Android and Google ecosystem insofar as I can.

It reinforces my choice to embrace the Apple ecosystem. While their products aren't perfect, they do take your privacy seriously and you do pay for it. But to me, that seems like a fair trade. Additionally, they have second to none customer support, so it's going to take a company providing the same level of support (3-5 business day repairs on laptops) for me to move away from Apple.

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Unfortunately security seems to be a problem only solvable with first world salaries it seems.

I really doubt most people earning 500 euros or less would think on the benefit of Apple's privacy when looking at their price ranges, many times just mapped directly from dollars into local currencies.

I will not buy a computer I do not have full root access to. Let me know when Apple gives users root on iOS devices.

Exactly. With Apple we get (maybe, who really knows? For how long until they decide to use the data they have?) more privacy but we also get a dictator who asserts control over the devices we buy.

It’s about time that we learn that there’s no free lunch. We either pay with our privacy, our attention, or with money. I prefer to pay with money.

I've been switching to Apple as well from Google/Microsoft, and the only challenging part so far is grabbing a professional icloud username. I'm very, very late to the icloud e-mail party, so literally every e-mail that doesn't have a chain of five numbers on the end is taken.

I wish they'd add a few more domain options. Oh well, services are wonderful otherwise.

Hoping they refresh the Macbook Air this October so I can move away from Windows 10 automatically installing candy crush every time I do a clean install. Windows is moving right back to the bloat of yesteryear, but this time it's Microsoft bundling the garbage.

Why don't you use your own email with iCloud account? Using your own email address to login into Gmail or iCloud will let you dump these services easier if you decide to.

I could and thought about that. If Apple focuses less on privacy on the future, I could go the fastmail route. Apple, if I recall correctly, does let you change your icloud ID, thus moving away shouldn't be hard.

For now, I'd rather have most services with one provider I trust as that really is convenient for me. That was Google before (mistakenly?), but no longer.

True. Unfortunately, the rest of the world that cannot afford products from the apple ecosystem will continue to suffer and they are probably highest at risk of being exploited in ways they can't fathom.

Not sure if/how there's a way for privacy ethics to win over economics/convenience.

This has been my stance as well. I'm all in on the Apple ecosystem over anything google and have started moving all of my activity off of google. (Firefox, Proton Mail, iOS, Pi-Hole) Google is a top contender of mine for most evil tech company, right behind Facebook.

Every post about google, facebook or privacy, there is a PR comment about Apple.

Apple doesn't care about privacy any more than google believed in "do no evil". They collect data on you just like google does. They buy data from other vendors like google does. They sell data on you.

The idea that a company who gives data to the chinese government cares about privacy is laughable.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-apple-china...

You shouldn't confine yourself to an "ecosystem" controlled by one company. Be that google or apple.

surely confining yourself to just one would limit the reselling of your data though? i.e just 1 company, instead of multiple will be peddling your privacy to other buyers

You can turn off icloud in china and your phone is secure (presumably). And apps such as wechat have less abilities to read data on an iphone.

Apple had a choice: icloud in china or leave china. Would chinese citizens be better served if android was the only option?

As for data, apple collects less of it. You can verify that with a data request: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...

And much of their data for apps like maps is anonymized.

On what basis can you reasonably equate their data efforts to google's? Everyone needs data, but apple does legitimately seem to take privacy more seriously.

Literally nothing you said is true. Apple doesn't sell your data and they collect dramatically less data which has been proven numerous times. This is basically a cheap attempt at trolling.

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