Tim Cook: You Deserve Privacy Online. Here’s How You Could Get It | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook: You Deserve Privacy Online. Here’s How You Could Get It

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I ve said this before but I ll say it again, between GOOG/FB/MSFT Apple seems to be doing more to privacy and it’s mainly in part due to their business model where most of their revenue comes just from selling products and not ads. (May be MSFT is more diversified than the other two). It will be interesting to see how this plays out in their favor.

Key words being "seem to," which is due solely to a marketing construction. They make devices that you can't (realistically) develop for without giving your credit card or bank information. When the iPhone was released, you couldn't even use the device at all without an iTunes account with payment information.

These sort of replies always show up in these threads. They’re also absolutely, 100% wrong. About as clueless as the classic “less space than a Nomad” line.

Apple isn’t buying your credit and loyalty card transaction history.

Apple isn’t storing plaintext transcripts of your chats, and using access to them as a tool for backroom political deals.

Apple’s former HQ wasn’t turned into Palantir’s HQ.

People need to stop making these sort of comparisons. It doesn’t make you look smart. It makes you seem either insanely pedantic or completely uninformed about what the other companies ARE doing. You can criticize Apple for their pricing model, the uselessness of iTunes, whatever ... Privacy is not one of those options. The closer you are to this actual issue (and I’m pretty damn close to it), the more you know that this is the truth.

As much as you try to deflect, my statement is factually correct about what Apple IS and WAS doing and just one of many reasons why Apple is worse than alternatives for privacy.

> Apple’s former HQ wasn’t turned into Palantir’s HQ.

What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Might have been true ages ago but I set up a few iPhone 7’s for staff last week and you could get past go without payment details attached to the iCloud account.

I think apple is still not there

* You have to identify yourself and log in to use an apple product.

* Apple products contact apple continuously, along with akamai and others (cdns are the cookies you cannot disable)

* You cannot firewall apps, they can always access the network.

* Apps can run in various ways without you realizing it, during installation, notifications, deep links, etc...

* Apple piggybacks services you do not want on the back of legitimate services:

- turning on bluetooth will also enable ibeacon tracking services, and your device can become a beacon.

- turning on wifi will also collect data for crowdsourced location information

- your device will auto-connect to various wifi services out of the box.

- pasting a web link in mail, imessage, etc will look it up, and following it is shared with apps using deep linking.

I do think Tim Cook is right about something, only legislation can slow things down (it will never stop things, because the bills will be compromised on before they become law).

I also think Apple could still change their behavior. Let people turn things off. Even the "anonymous" data/analytics apple collects. Even the network.

I think many legitimate companies over-collect data out of fear of not having enough information. It's the mindset - if I allow people to opt-out, we will get no information to understand things or make decisions with or provice services. Beginner leader mistake - you don't need perfect information.

I think with trust comes unfettered commerce.

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