Hacker News Reader

Comment by g45y45 | Hacker News Reader

privacy

For me, this is the #1 reason. Sure the Apple ecosystem is fantastic (lastpass on my iphone can prefill passwords on my apple TV!) and the level of polish and quality is high, but the one single solitary thing that would truly prevent me from moving to Chromebook or a pixel is the privacy aspect.

Apple has done well to make privacy one of their prime offerings.

If you are willing to take total control of your mobile environment, Android can give you very good privacy. Arguably better than Apple.

Simply buy a Pixel (or any other device that supports AOSP). Build your own AOSP image (which is quite easy). And you are ready to go. Use applications from F-Droid only.

Admittedly it's not as straightforward as running your favorite Linux distro, and there are some caveats, but it's quite close.

This reads a lot like the HN-famous Dropbox comment.

Im sorry man, you are misinformed

https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb

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

Neither of these articles relate to a pure AOSP install without Google Play services, which is what the poster was talking about.

Sorry, my bad.

Both of those apply to iPhones as well. The only difference is that on iOS, you cannot turn off AGPS location collection, while on Android, not only can you turn it off, it's opt in.

And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.

> transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do

I really hope this is untrue. My instinct is that you perhaps can't be a big behemoth of a company if you don't behave like Google and Facebook, but Apple occupied that middle territory successfully for a long time.

I don't think so. They did a bunch of extra engineering work to do machine learning on photos in a way that respected people's privacy. iCloud Photo Library has been working great for me, and the photos are encrypted on my devices before they land in iCloud. The current implementation has the drawback that all of my devices need to do the ML work independently as a result, but it still works okay.

As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.

> As a fairly heavy iCloud user, I wouldn't say they "suck" at services. They're not as good as Google at it, to be sure, but most things work pretty well for me.

I would also add that Apple is actively working to close the gap. Look at last years hire of Giannandrea from Google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...

According to recent tests, Siri has already improved a lot.

For state-sponsored privacy, sure. But for ad-tracking privacy, I don't think you can do comprehensive ad-blocking in browsers on iPhones, right? It's still either VPN-based or the capped blocklist api, right?

I would love to switch, but Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience. The moment I can do what uBlock does on an iPhone, I'll switch.

What do you mean by the “capped” blacklist API?

There is a limit of 50,000 URL filters.

Which is perfectly fine for me but if you have a lot of subscribed lists it is possible to go over it.

At the moment my 1Blocker X installation is sitting at ~93,000 rules and I haven't seen a single ad or social widget in almost a year now.

Sure, part of them aren't domain/URL based (they are CSS/XPath based) so I might not actually be disproving what you said.

I believe 1blocker X made a new app with more categories so they could get around the cap. Like the cap was category based, but not hard to circumvent.

Oh, that might explain it. Thanks for the tidbit.

Firefox Focus (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios) claims to block ad trackers.

A few days ago my friend complained that her phone had randomly started popping up ads on its screen as she was just using it. She had to dig through the play store and find the 'recently used apps' to identify the culprit, which was a random app she'd downloaded that after a few days updated itself to start pumping out ads.

That is a distinctly android problem, and is an example of one I'm glad to avoid by sticking to iOS.

> random app she'd downloaded

Perhaps she should be more selective with apps she installs? Also, how would this be exclusive to Android? iOS apps can have ads on them. Even if the feature is added with an update.

The ads weren't only displaying in the app, they were appearing over other apps. This is something that simply can't happen in iOS.

How does a standard user know whether a small app to e.g. manipulate photos (as in this instance) is going to be updated a few days later to show ads when it's not running? Shouldn't an end user be able to trust Google's app marketplace to not feed them junk like this?

There's a permission "draw over other apps" which has legitimate uses but is also used for crap like this.

> Firefox+uBlock on Android is soooo nice for a fast mobile browsing experience

I use BlockBear on safari. Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS. Hell, hacker news loads faster(less than a blink of my eye) on my iPhone than 2017 MacBook Pro.

> Any speed gains you may have because of uBlock are offset by the cpu speed gains on iPhone XS.

Depends on network performance, how heavy your typical sites visited are, and what type of configuration you're running on uBlock.

Anecdotally, I find my Snapdragon 835 phone with Firefox/Ublock Origin to feel somewhat faster than my A10 with Safari/1 Blocker X. (Plus Firefox/uBlock gives various QOL improvements over Safari, like customizably removing cruft from various sites, and not autoplaying video.) My biggest complaint with Firefox/uBlock Origin is that the UI isn't very nice for whitelisting scripts on mobile.

See now, I'm like everybody else. I don't care about privacy.

What I do care about is being manipulated. I don't want to be persuaded to buy stuff I don't want or need.

Google can know everything about me, but I don't want the ads thanks very much.

Oh, and I want a news feed of things that are actually important, not what some algorithm thinks I want to see.

> I don’t care about privacy. What I do care about is being manipulated.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but those two sentences contradict each other. ;)

The main publicly visible application of personal data is advertising, so if you don’t want ads or manipulation, then you actually do care about privacy.

And are you certain you don’t care about privacy outside of ads? If so, why? Many people who’ve said things like that just didn’t even think at all about what happens or could happen to their personal information. Would it surprise you if you found out that insurance companies were purchasing personal information in order to increase their denial rates on claims? Would it bother you if your personal information was used to support a politcal party you oppose? Would it concern you if your personal habits were used to advertise to your neighbors or co-workers or friends or family instead of you personally?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

You need to work on your argument a bit I think. I get what you are saying, but your points are a little weak.

And I was being a little flippant, of course I care if somebody used my identity to commit crimes, that's a total pain in the butt for me.

> You need to work on your argument a bit I think. I get what you are saying, but your points are a little weak.

Okay, sure. I asked you why you don’t care about privacy, and you haven’t bothered to answer. I don’t really mind if my argument is weak, but yes I could certainly work on it and improve it if I had a reason to. I can’t read your mind, though. Do you want to provide any reasoning for your case or counter-argument at all?

Two things to think about. 1- I wasn’t attacking you, in case you felt like I was criticizing, and were just trying to criticize me back. 2- None of the examples I gave are made up, they are all real things that have happened.

this guy gets it!

Today Android and IOS are on par using an AdBlock VPN. A Solution with OpenVPN, DNSmasq, Ad, Malware and Tracking blocklists.

For example a turnkey business service is https://ba.net/adblockvpn

That ignores the privacy threat Google itself poses. There's a lot of things I don't like about Apple, but using a phone whose operating system contains unlimited amounts if closed source Google code is really scary to me, simply due to their business model and their disrespect of privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com