Hacker News Reader

Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

Care to be more specific? Sharing of location, contacts, photos, calendars, access to your camera, etc are all disabled for 3rd party apps by default, and must be enabled individually for each app.

What are all these privacy settings you are referring to that are off by default?

View on HN

From what I understand (haven't set up an iPhone from default in a long time) but the 'limit ad tracking' is off by default, allowing apps to have background app refresh privileges is allowed for any app by default (you must manually disable for any offenders unless you want it off for everything), the privacy features in Safari are off by default, and Apple's own data-collection and location-collection is also on by default.

Apple has a giant privacy document goes into great detail as to how that information is anonymized and rendered untraceable[1]. Which privacy features are disabled in safari (or more specifically which features are implemented that are always on)?

As for Limit Ad Tracking I'm honestly not sure what that actually does - given that according to this article apps are vigorously abusing their users irrespective of any user's settings.

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

What you say doesn't jive with TFA, which claims that the "information is [NOT] anonymized and rendered untraceable".

What's the catch with Apple's privacy document? Is it just that they're ignoring issues about what apps do? I mean, they make such a big deal about vetting apps.

Apple is saying apple’s products don’t collect data where possible, it’s not a statement on how 3rd party apps mistreat users

Limit Ad Tracking will zero out the advertising identifier, which is a vendor-specific ID used to track a device.

Settings -> Privacy -> Advertising.

None of that seems buried to me. Took me under 15 seconds to locate the privacy menu.

Also their advertising info/policy is accessible from that menu as well and is written in very clear, easy to understand language.

Location services are not ‘location-collection’ and are off by default.

Is Apple disabling the automatic iCloud sync for the supposed "end-to-end encrypted" iMessages yet?

If not, what is even the point of E2E encryption in iMessage if 99% of the iPhone users' conversations can be retrieved from their iCloud accounts?

And that's not even mentioning the fact that iMessage has a design flaw that allows Apple to include an invisible third-party into people's "end-to-end encrypted conversations." Apple has known about it for like 3 years, but I haven't seen them try to fix it.

Messages in the Cloud is and has always been disabled by default.

So your 99% number is nonsense.

And E2E encryption is to stop MITM attacks which are quite common if you are using untrusted networks e.g. open WiFi networks.

> And E2E encryption is to stop MITM attacks which are quite common if you are using untrusted networks e.g. open WiFi networks.

Those could also be avoided with encrypted (but not E2E encrypted) messages. E2E is supposed to be stronger than that.

Correct. The point of End to End encryption is that nobody else knows the contents of messages under any circumstances other than those in the conversation (usually 2 people).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com