Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

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