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Comment by mjw1007 | Hacker News Reader

While I have no sympathy at all for Facebook, this is a rather chilling reminder of Apple's ability to decide what you're allowed to run on your own phone.

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Chilling isn't my takeaway. It's that Apple take the threat of surreptitious data gathering seriously and enforces its rules for other companies to that effect.

It's either that, or they employed their market dominance to strike at their competitor. Without a public regulator that fines both Facebook and Apple for their respective abuses, we will never know which.

A public regulator of tech oligopolies is a great idea. Until that happens we have few choices in whom we chose to trust. Apple is no corporate saint but for now it is the best of the lot because of its business model.

You really trust the government to regulate tech fairly?

I trust them ("them" being developed-world democracies; obviously there are more concerns with, say, the Saudis) more than I trust tech to self-regulate.

You're not going to get a self-imposed GDPR.

But private corporations also can’t forceable take away your freedom and your property. If I have the choice between giving the government more power and private companies. I worry a lot more about government power.

> But private corporations also can’t forceable take away your freedom and your property.

Sure they can. GDPR was necessarily because tech has largely obliterated the right to privacy online, with like buttons, analytics, ad networks, etc.

Well considering that the worse that corporations can do with data is sell your privacy compared to the worse that the government can do - throw you in jail if you give them too much power. I’d rather not give government more power.

Trump has outright said that he is in favor of jailing journalists for spreading “fake news”. You know if the government passed a law to “protect privacy” they would give themselves an exemption and want a backdoor.

You can debate worst-case "the US gets taken over by Nazis" scenarios, but it's also important to consider current use.

I find Facebook a far more significant currently active risk to my privacy than I do the government. I'd love to see a GDPR in the US.

I’m not debating the worse case. I’m going by history of how the FBI acted in the 60s during the Civil Rights Area and how it currently acts with the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs”.

Having a government that is actively hostile to minorities - religious, race, nationality, or sexuality only takes a populist leader who speaks toward their prejudices....

Oh, come on.

If we're going to go historical, we'll have to include company towns (which Facebook is revisiting as a concept, incidentally) and debt slavery, the Pinkertons machine gunning strikers...

It isn’t “historical” what is happening today in Gitmo, being able to be locked up without a trial if you are deemed a “terrorist”, or secret warrants.

Completely? No. But when it comes to data and privacy I think it'd be better than today's wild west.

Who would have thought ten years ago so many people would be willingly give companies a live feed video stream of the inside and outside of your house, along with voice recordings of everything?

And the government would never use its power to design laws against its enemies in a Democratic society.

A Democratic society ruled by the majority never passes laws that discriminate against minorities and is never hostile against minorities....

It depends which one.

Government regulation often comes about as a result of failure to self-regulate. Facebook doesn't care about torches and pitchforks, but your Congressional representative does. Now, were FB (or tech companies in general) smart, they'd self-regulate before the citizenry starts digging in the garden shed for implements.

But tech companies, and especially FB lately, aren't smart. And, like the three year olds their maturity reflects, they bitch and moan when the hammer comes down. Well hey, Ayn, I've got an idea: stick a finger to the wind and sort your shit before the Big, Bad Government(tm) comes a-knockin'. Because when they come, shit's going to change and probably not in a way you like. Might as well get out in front of that narrative.

My congressional representative is spending 2/3rds of his time fundraising.

https://bulletin.represent.us/much-time-congress-members-spe...

Especially in the south, the only thing they have to do is demonize “them”, wave a bible in one hand and a gun in the other to get re-elected while raising money from corporations.

Neither they nor their constituents vote based on “privacy”.

Are Facebook and Apple competitors?

iMessage <-> WhatsApp. But that's a pretty minor business segment for Apple...

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say Apple and Facebook are competitors. Apple makes its money selling stuff, Facebook by selling attention.

That being said, the incentives for Apple to become more like Facebook are quite strong and you can see it in the direction Microsoft has gone with Cortana and in-OS ads.

So who are you positing as becoming more like Facebook, Apple or Microsoft? Or do you assume that they’re equivalent?

I think OP's stance is something like:

Given that Apple has the ability to control what software can and cannot run on your device (to a large extent), this is a praiseworthy use of this power, however, on the whole, it would be preferable for Apple not to have this ability.

Facebook still has this power on android. If you don’t want the protections of apples walled garden feel free to swim in the unregulated waters of android

Absolutely! We should have laws protecting our privacy online and offline, from governments and from private entities. We should be able to sue Facebook and their ilk into oblivion. Until then, anyone who stands for privacy is on my side and has my business.

In a world where there are no weasels like FB, constantly trying to see what they can get away with, I too would prefer that Apple not have that ability. But in the world I currently live in, I'll reluctantly side with Apple having that ability. And the instant they use it not to my liking, I can go buy some other brand of phone.

How would Apple be able to enforce any of its user privacy policies without having some control? Write the developers a sternly worded letter?

Leave it up to the user (or, possibly, their parents if they're under-age) and give them the tools for maintaining their privacy. For example:

Have appropriate app permissions (which we mostly already have).

State that only apps within the app store are monitored to be privacy-friendly/"trustworthy", while still allowing a relatively hassle-free way of installing apps from outside it, similarly to how Android does it (except that I don't necessarily trust Google to ensure that the apps within the Play Store are "trustworthy").

Label "untrustworthy" apps (similarly to how F-Droid labels potentially unwanted features).

Now, since Apple currently has more intrusive control, I want them to use it for "good", but I don't want them having this power in the first place. As an analogy, if there were policemen stationed on every corner in the city, I'd probably want them to prevent suicidal people from jumping off bridges, but that doesn't mean that I want the policemen to be there.

(For the record, I use Android.)

To me it’s a fallacy that even a highly skilled and knowledgeable person could set their own privacy settings to what they’d actually like. When you have huge forces arrayed against you, an powerful advocate is necessary.

> To me it’s a fallacy that even a highly skilled and knowledgeable person could set their own privacy settings to what they’d actually like.

Do you mean on a phone or on any computing device? I'm pretty confident that I've set the privacy settings to my liking on my GNU/Linux laptop. (Well, with the giant exception of tracking by websites, but I think that uBlock+uMatrix on Firefox still deal with that slightly better than Safari's blocking.) You could argue that in this case Debian (or the like) is my powerful advocate, but it's a powerful advocate who doesn't take away control of my device.

Not arguing about the point that Apple can decide what runs on your phone, but in this case Facebook was in clear violation of the terms of agreement. And they only shut down their enterprise apps not the actual Facebook app.

It's not really an agreement, if you want to support Apple customers you either accept or leave that market to Apple itself. For something like social networking, that's absolutely massive, and we can't say that Apple has been shy to duplicate and replace applications with their own versions, and push them along with their ecosystem.

What we see here are two monopolists fighting, it's hard to pick a side but imagine what chances a startup has in this environment. The robber barons are back.

Seeing that there are thriving competitors for every app that Apple bundles. There are existence proofs that Apple hasn’t pushed developers away.

> it's hard to pick a side but imagine what chances a startup has in this environment.

Facebook is constantly paranoid about new social media networks taking away their advertising space. This is them admitting a startup has a chance in the environment. Social media platforms gain huge traction and lose favor every year. Facebook sticking is an unnatural position and they know it.

Apple's flagship product, the iPhone is suffering from longer and longer upgrade cycles as the category matures. Many people are starting to ask if a new product category can replace smartphones. This is coming at a time when Apple doesn't have Jobs, and it's possible they won't be in the early wave of innovators on the next tech wave. A small innovative team could outperform Apple on this front.

In this particular case the agreement is not the app store agreement but a entreprise certificate for which you have to apply separately and which gives you special treatment. It enables you to create and distribute apps without going through app store review under condition that you will never distribute them outside your organisation. Facebook quite deliberately violated this rule.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want them to decide that I'm not allowed to run on my phone.

Yes. While they were justified this time, it is possible that they won't be justified in the future. Management now is not management then. Anything that outsources control of this level to a third party is a business risk for a company of any size. We need better solutions.

It was a voluntary agreement (license) that was broken. It's hardly chilling.

Given the number of people using iPhones, you basically have to support the platform in order to make any money, so I wouldn't say the agreement is really "voluntary".

The internal cert is different from a regular application cert. The conditions for use are explicit.

Apple and Google, these corporations signed a license agreement to conduct themselves a certain way and failed to do that WRT the enterprise org cert. They were not forced into signing an agreement and have access to excellent legal council. This is a manifestation of the prevailing culture.

Furthermore Facebook is ruthless about enforcing their IP to "their" data (also voluntarily offered by users) and Google dictates the same way, except much of Google's data is hoovered up. These companies have all have a history of dictating and exclusion.

I know this is crazy talk, but facebook could release the code and allow users to load onto their phone using xcode.

You're not wrong about the scale of their abilities.

At the same time I think it is good to have someone ... make the right call. It's just that we have to hope they keep making the right one.

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