This is just facebook all over again. Why can't people see trouble-tech? I never used facebook and won't ever use an alexa, nor whatever google's thing is.
At the risk of stating the obvious; Facebook has more than demonstrated the opposite.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon have never given me a single reason to trust that they have my privacy concerns on their mind.
The board's legal mandate is to make as much money as possible. As soon as privacy is no longer a fad that makes more money and growth than the opportunity cost to not violating it, Apple will flip a switch. That's their duty as a for profit company.
Why do people keep repeating this falsehood?
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
Per SCOTUS in US v. Hobby Lobby:
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
Can Apple opt to do bad or short-sighted things? Yes.
Are they legally required to do them to maximize profits? No.
The same Apple that gave the Chinese government access to all their Chinese user's iCloud data?
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
The Chinese government access is _not_ limited to metadata.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
Literally the first paragraph of both of bduerst's links suggest otherwise.
Also, I don't know if you've used iCloud on multiple devices before, but it very much contains iMessage data contents.
1) The implementation of the wake word recognition is implemented in hardware that cannot be updated remotely.
2) The device is unable to transmit information without lighting up a TX light. Implemented in unmodifiable hardware.
3) Voice recordings are processed and then deleted within one month.
4) The device is run by a company that doesn't make money through marketing or data analysis.
1&2 get the company pilloried by HN the moment a vulnerability comes out.
3 is a requirement that doesn't actually solve any problems and ruins a legitimate need of ML - comparing performance against a known baseline.
4 is overbroad - most software companies make their money through data analysis of one form or another.
You're setting up an impossible set of demands that no manufacturer is going to meet and no consumer really cares about (other than perhaps yourself and a few tinfoil hat wearing crypto-anarchists).
I trust Amazon as much as I do Apple to protect customer privacy.
Pain in the ass but you could open source it for the rest of the world.
I like that term. Would really like a definition.
How does 'technology whose short term value is negated by long term negative effects' sound?
On the other hand, this is Facebook's business model.
Not according to the NY Times this week. Amazon have been reading your private messages on Facebook.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-priva...
It's not as bad. It's the difference between paying somebody to tell them secrets about you and selling secrets about you. But it's definitely not a thing a person respectful of your privacy would do.
Literally every company that has access to users' data has in one way or another some kind of business model based on selling that data. Every day I come across 2 or 3 articles from big newspapers giving Facebook some shit about selling user data. But what about Experian? What about phone carriers? They all sell users' data, maybe anonymous maybe not but they are still making profit on people's privacy.
And when some shit goes down, we make a big fuss about it for a few days and then we go back to normal. Equifax anyone?
Honestly, companies in the position of making profit on users' data have been doing it for the better part of 15 years now, I don't understand why we are acting so surprised now.
Most peoples lives are as simple as going to school and work, raising a family, taking vacations, paying bills, and then passing away.
There will never be a moment where they can say “Yes! My avoidance of Facebook and Alexa for all my life has finally paid off! Hahaha!”
The only people who can say that are people who have good reasons to hide: drug dealers with multiple lines of business, professional black hat hackers, home grown terrorists, life insurance fraudsters, etc.
The average person has nothing of interest to offer except more information about them in order to better perceive trends and distribute ads to them so that maybe they buy something.
Please don't pretend that both "only criminals have something to hide" and "criminals are by definition bad people" are true statements. Neither is true.
Even under the most oppressive governments though, there will still be a sizable majority that doesn’t have anything to hide and can feel secure using most technology, and they’ll be fine.
... yet? :)
This mindset seems to be why the US political parties keep handing each other more and more federal power. Nobody can imagine their nation would be so stupid as to ever put the Other Guys back in power again.
Second, just because it doesn't describe your government now doesn't mean it won't in the future, unfortunately. Consider examples of a 1920s German, or a 1960s Iranian (the old regime was oppressive too, but in different ways), or a 2000s citizen of Poland.
Third, there are certainly places where the danger is not from the government but from your neighbors, including to some of the groups I listed. So thinking about this only from the perspective of governments and criminality is off. Hence my claim that "only criminals have something to hide" is a false statement.
Fourth, I suspect that perception of how much one has to hide is highly age-dependent. As people get older they discover more and more things that they either want to hide or wish they could have hidden. Maybe I'm wrong in my guess as to your age, of course, but if I am not, I strongly urge talking about this sort of thing with people a few decades older. It can be _very_ eye-opening. Certainly was for me.
This is the risk averse argument against certain technologies. If you believe your government won’t change and are willing to take that bet, you can lean into technologies very hard and reap the benefits.
Of course, if you think there may be a day where your government will change and use technologies against you, you could live out in the boonies and never even touch a computer, and thus get no benefits from emerging tech.
It’s a trade off between being at the bleeding edge and being as secure and private as possible. Personally, I have made my decision. Could it be my undoing one day if government decides I’m guilty of everything? Sure, but I doubt it will happen. I’ll take the bet.
That said, I also think we should work toward changing the nature of the tradeoff, e.g. by changing how voice assistants work to minimize the privacy issues. I suspect there's a lot of work we could do on that front while not compromising the functionality of the voice assistants.
However, I know that there are lots of people who do have those things they need to hide, and if only the people who need to keep things private work to keep things private, than the very fact that they are keeping things private becomes a risk factor.
Just like how part of the value of https everywhere is to prevent encrypted traffic from standing out, everyone maintaining privacy helps prevent people who NEED privacy from standing out.
Of course, as an individual, there is a cost for demanding that privacy - I lose out on the benefits of things like the echo and facebook. And since I am not an individual who needs privacy, there is no individual incentive to maintain it. It is a bit of a collective action problem.
"Sir, we have decided for unspecified reasons to suddenly decline your medical insurance. Have a nice day."
I think there's a lot of unexplored "how should/will society work" ground here, or at least explored only in science fiction, and it will be interesting to see how things shake out in the future. Maybe we will move to an "assume everyone is recorded all the time and put 0 weight on these recordings in anything that matters" world, for example... Hard to tell.
> The average person has nothing of interest to offer except more information about them in order to better perceive trends and distribute ads to them so that maybe they buy something.
This is a remarkably dehumanizing way of looking at people. You’re basically saying that people have nothing useful to offer except things we can use to sell them more stuff.
That this flawed and toxic thinking is so often repeated, especially in tech circles, truly horrifies me.
I'm not actually suggesting that Amazon does this right now, but it would be pretty easy for them to do so. People should be very worried about this technology and if they choose to use it, they should be absolutely sure the data is being used in a way that doesn't screw them over. Your boring data is absolutely interesting to people who want to abuse you. That's why there's such a big price on it!
This approaches one thing I always wonder when this comes up: Are people with that argument really okay with their co-workers finding out what porn they watch and when they watch it?
It's perhaps a little extreme, but I can totally see it becoming a possibility due to large leaks like this.
Regardless, I disagree with the argument, as things you don't need to hide now can become things you wish you had hidden later (think of Jewish people in Germany in the 1920s whose religion and ethnicity were obvious).
A) It depends on if you enable it. B) Just because you're willing to accept something in one domain doesn't mean you are universally OK with it being applied everywhere. C) I trust Apple much more than I trust Amazon.