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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

> More interesting: Apple’s evolving brand promise. The old Apple promise was that you don't have to worry if the tech works. The new promise is you don't have to worry if the tech is scamming you. Everything Apple showed was about curation, safety and trust. No tracking, no scammy ads, no loot boxes, no weird credit card charges. And Oprah.

This is an extremely good point. I'm a technical person, I love open technologies, but I've invested in Apple devices because right now we have no choice but to put trust in one major tech company or another, and Apple is the only one I have an iota of trust in not to screw me over. They're smartly capitalizing on a culture shift of tech-skepticism, and I'm not ashamed to say that that sales pitch works on me. Their competitors would be wise to take notice.

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Unfortunately, they're playing both sides of the game.

If Apple would let you use their products anonymously, that would be a clear indicator they were on the side of privacy.

a couple pointed questions:

- do you know what apps on your iphone are doing? can you find out?

- do you know who they contact?

- do you know what technologies they are using? deep linking? ibeacons?

- can you firewall your apps?

Nobody can totally prevent third-party apps from recording your interactions with them, though Apple has made some effort (https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/apple-glassbox-apps/). Apple also strongly enforces that third-party apps have to gracefully degrade when individual permissions are denied. So that a delivery app, for example, can't strong-arm you into enabling location services by refusing to work otherwise.

All of Apple's first-party services give detailed breakdowns of what information Apple receives before it does so. Other than privately-stored iCloud data, they send virtually zero non-anonymized data to Apple. And as much as possible - especially with things like Maps - they keep data local to your device.

So no, I don't always know who third-party apps are contacting, because nobody can. But I do know (and have control over) every interaction they have with the rest of my device and data. For first-party apps, I do know everyone they contact and with what information, and it's kept to a reasonable minimum.

> because nobody can

On my apple desktop, little snitch does tell me this information.

I think it would be totally reasonable to give interested users visibility and/or control over this sort of thing on their phone.

As mentioned in another comment, any number of VPN services can accomplish this (though of course VPNs, like any software that records and modifies your traffic, pose a security risk themselves).

Security researcher Will Strafach is launching an iOS VPN service called Guardian Mobile Firewall that proposes to allow users to audit all the third-party services that apps connect to. I haven't gotten into the beta yet, so I don't really know how it works, but the screenshots Strafach has been sharing on Twitter look comprehensive.

> So that a delivery app, for example, can't strong-arm you into enabling location services by refusing to work otherwise

I can confirm this. I work for a top 10 consumer focused app (< #10 on the App store) and Apple did exactly this - ask us to enable users to use the app even without giving location permissions. There have been multiple push backs from Apple similar to this regarding user privacy and security and none from Google. And this isn't a vague generalization - Google has never asked us about this stuff, ever. It just isn't a priority. And so, as you might expect, I tend to trust and use the Apple platform for a lot of my personal stuff.

You asked a bunch of questions no consumer at scale cares about or understands.

Those are not sellable perks to anyone but people on hacker news. Let’s hope those terms never show up on Apple marketing pushes.

My questions are not posed to consumers, they are posed to folks here on hacker news.

Your suggestion implied that consumers aren’t getting true value because the lack of ability for the user to do this laundry list of technical offerings.

Don’t move the goal post.

I believe knowing what your app is doing and who it is contacting is important and of value.

For instance, the amazon kindle app contacts facebook. Would it be of value for consumers to know their phone is doing this?

It's tragic how much of afar fry the effects of capitalism are from their ideals. In a 'pro business' world, business would constantly sub contract out to each other; think like these scooter companies being used to make deliveries. But the reality is resource management is just so much more effective in-house. Like you state, it becomes increasingly difficult for third parties to operate. It's almost as if centralization is a natural result of industry.

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