Source? Everything we've seen in terms of technical publication about the design of their software and hardware says the opposite. They're intentionally baking privacy into their services where others have done the exact opposite.
Sure, I can use a fake address, but what if they start to check against it and then lock me out of my account?
It’s bad enough all the players require my full name. I do use an alias whenever I can, but for vital accounts, I don’t because I’m afraid one day they’ll ask for a government issued ID to verify my account or I get locked out.
Exactly. Without source code you have no idea what they're doing. All you know it's what they say they are doing. Two completely different things.
> (I sure have and am glad to have a full understanding of everything going out).
That's impossible.
Hint: You do not need to manually, personally, audit every single line of code to discover the use of such functionality.
Apple makes money by selling stuff to people, not selling people to advertisers.
Granted, this data is on-device, and we don't know how much (if any) leaves the device, but if Apple really had privacy as their top priority, they wouldn't collect that data in the first place. Privacy is surely important for Apple, but it's not the absolute top.
After data is stored, it can be extracted by attackers who exploit a vulnerability in the OS, or by anyone with physical access who finds out the passcode. (eg. by coercion, by camera surveillance, or by simply looking over someone's shoulder)
If an operating system truly put privacy first, all that data would never be stored in the first place.
Obviously it's a tradeoff. If you want smart recommendations and all the "AI" features, you need to collect and store a lot of data.
If you value privacy above all else, you have to store as little data as possible, and you have to say "no" to features that require analyzing a lot of data.
Would it be _better_ if all Apple software was fully open source and could be independently audited by anyone? Yes. Does that invalidate everything else? No.
Also, Wireshark is a good way to monitor what data your phone is sending to what servers, even if it's incredibly imperfect.
That's not proof of anything, but again, at some point I feel you have to assume good faith. Apple does not have a history of doing stuff like this.
Seriously, the fundamental issue with proprietary is maintenance, ie., not finding but fixing (in a good way) problems and then making those fixes available to other users. Adding features to scratch niche itches is another, though arguably not as critical a matter. But for merely reverse engineering, decompiling, probing memory, fuzzing and all that lack of source code is effectively zero barrier. If it wasn't then source/algorithm obscurity really would be effective for security rather then a bad joke.
_Of course_ it's possible to prove a negative. Why do people insist on repeating this as if it's actually true?
Are you saying that Apple can be proven a company that can be trusted to keep user data secure?
Additionally, in this case, the claim that a company can be trusted is much more difficult to prove than the claim that they cannot be. Burden of proof, difficulty of proof, and whether the claim is expressed as a positive or a negative have no intrinsic link.
No, they aren't.
One, disproving a negative claim is exactly proving the opposite (positive, if the same style of expression is used) claim (and vice versa), so it can't be harder to both prove and disprove negative claims, even if they were real distinct classes.
Second, “positive” and “negative” claims are largely phrasing choices; it's quite possible to have positive and negative claims that are semantically equivalent.
https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+privacy+efforts&oq=app...
https://www.apple.com/lae/privacy/approach-to-privacy/
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989608/apple-data-down...
When you are the one making a claim refuting what is generally considered common knowledge, you're expected to provide SOME citation of your disputed claim... not to mention it's such a common internet troll tactic to spew BS just to make people do research to prove you're full of it that it's just kind of common courtesy to start with links (assuming you aren't a troll).
http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...
There is a valid discussion to be had as to whether UX or data privacy should be prioritized, but I'm inclined towards UX--most people just want to get the best search results possible.
If anything, on the UX <--> privacy scale, I'd argue Apple has sometimes been prioritizing privacy too highly as of late. As a heavy user of custom Applescripts, the new TCC dialogs introduced in Mojave have been causing me a lot of grief.