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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Way back when, I had two Android phones and really liked them. I switched to Apple phone, tablet, and watch because of privacy.

The title is a little strange, almost like saying you don’t need those luxury Apple devices to get privacy, but that is wrong. For the mass market, I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy. I use some Google services like GSuite, Play Books, and Play Movies heavily but I cringe a little.

Not counting GCP, just consumer offerings: if Apple provided a good email service that supported custom domains, I would just use them for everything except deployment platforms like GCP and AWS.

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I made the Android - Apple jump for the same reason four years back. Indeed I was so happy with Apple's privacy features and their business model in general. I did miss the tight integration of Google Maps and mail but felt justified for the privacy gains.

Then their growth started to slow so they jacked their prices to ten Benjamins, when really good Android phones cost half that. I really had to evaluate how much I valued my privacy from Google in particular, and it didn't feel like worth 500 every two years. Important point being compromising with my data with just Google and blocking all the other companies (Facebook, etc). Google while it's collecting a metric fuckton of data about me, seems to be a lot more transparent about it and gives clear ways to clean my slate. Also doesn't look like it shares it with any other partners. So I just figured I'll stop paying the apple tax for now, and reevaluate later if the situation changes.

Looks like you figured out by yourself that privacy is indeed a luxury good, in spite of what Pichai claims.

> I did miss the tight integration of Google Maps and mail but felt justified for the privacy gains

Hm, if you are still using GMail and GMaps (and possibly also Google Search), what privacy did you gain?

>I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy.

We have no lasting friends, no lasting enemies, only lasting interests. - Someone.

I trust Apple not because of my optimism that they will do good, I trust them because of my pessimistic view ( Comparatively Speaking , it seems every negative thoughts in Silicon Valley are considered as pessimistic )that everyone has an interest, and it is Apple's interest to sell me expensive ( comparatively ) devices and Services while making a profits, and not selling product and services and zero net margin subsidiser by selling my Data.

If you cringe a little you're really almost-acknowledging that you haven't /really/ done anything for your privacy. Maybe using Apple products is a bit of g33k virtue-signaling?

> For the mass market, I think Apple is the company that is least bad on privacy.

You've fallen for an audaciously mendacious marketing campaign. Try developing an app for your iDevice without telling Apple who you are or where you live. The only way to do so is to set up a shell corporation. Try setting a map application that works completely offline as your default street address handler. Impossible on iOS. Try getting your location without telling Apple where your device is. Also impossible. (Not sending your location to Google is not only possible but the default on even Google-flavored Android devices.) That's just the tip of the iceberg. Even better, Android lets you set up multiple users on a single device and easily switch between them to sandbox your private apps from your "get things done" apps.

> if Apple provided a good email service that supported custom domains, I would just use them for everything

Even assuming that Apple's marketing were true, how does this make sense? Email servers are supposed to store all your mail to make it easily searchable across all your devices. At the point a service is storing all your mail and making it searchable, its privacy implications exactly match Gmail's (but are worse than Gmail's for users in China).

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