Makes me happy to be a customer. Hope they keep enforcing their own rules and protecting their users' privacy and security in this fearless manner.
Apple definitely does make some commendable decisions, but I think it's also important to distinguish between bravery and what Ben Thompson calls "Strategy Credits" (https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/):
> Strategy Credit: An uncomplicated decision that makes a company look good relative to other companies who face much more significant trade-offs.
In fact, the world around you will bend to meet your values whether you’re even aware of it. And that includes any companies you run.
The world does extend beyond your knowledge of it.
This tends to further degrade as new employees are added and any whatever original vision was going on continues to degrade over time. Especially as both the times and even business models change.
I think once a company develops a reputation like that, most people just get desensitised to it. Also there is a degree to which lower cost products get a pass, because hey, they must be cutting corners somewhere.
Nonsense - this is a solved problem. You simply need to remove the ability to make defined classes of bad decisions by binding the company's future decision making capability with a Ulysses pact[1]. Cory Doctorow gave a good talk[2] about using Ulysses pacts in the tech industry.
>> It's not that you don't want to lose weight when you raid your Oreo stash in the middle of the night. It's just that the net present value of tomorrow's weight loss is hyperbolically discounted in favor of the carbohydrate rush of tonight's Oreos. If you're serious about not eating a bag of Oreos your best bet is to not have a bag of Oreos to eat. Not because you're weak willed. Because you're a grown up. And once you become a grown up, you start to understand that there will be tired and desperate moments in your future and the most strong-willed thing you can do is use the willpower that you have now when you're strong, at your best moment, to be the best that you can be later when you're at your weakest moment.
>> The answer to not getting pressure from your bosses, your stakeholders, your investors or your members, to do the wrong thing later, when times are hard, is to take options off the table right now.
This shouldn't be a problem for anybody that actually wants the moral outcome. Why would any=body insist on preserving the option to behave badly in the future unless that bad behavior is part of their future plans?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlN6wjeCJYk (transcript: https://d3j.de/2016/06/24/cory-doctorow-how-stupid-laws-and-... )
Companies lack unified decision making. The founders can’t predict every moral choice any employee will make. And for any large organization the CEO has no idea what most of the day to day decisions involve.
Consider something as simple as an old brick company setting up an email server for the first time. That opens up a host of choices management likely had zero idea even exist.
Otherwise, it only takes one person to short-circuit that value to set the ball rolling on a shift towards lower standards.
You need to run a super tight ship, which I think is not as hard as it sounds until you put VC, investment, and shareholders into the mix. You at least need to be super diligent about those people you bring in who are not accountable to you, but you are accountable to them.
Basecamp is an amazing example of a company that has succeeded without compromising itself a jot. They do all kinds of things that we might consider unthinkable because they won’t budge on their values. Probably the one company I’d drop everything to work for if I had a chance at getting through their hiring process.
Do they have any information about enterprise apps? As I understand it, Apple never phones home with app info (such as the identifier, name, etc) when verifying or installing enterprise-signed apps, so the only thing they know is probably the IP address requesting to verify the enterprise-signed app and the frequency of how often Apple devices do this certificate verification.
Considering FB and Google have many employees in all different parts of the world, it wouldn't be too suspicious to see a good amount of diversity between GeoIP regions.
Correct me if i'm wrong about what info Apple collects about enterprise apps.
Anyway I wholehartedly agree with you here and I think Apple genuinely had no knowledge of this activity until news outlets reported on it. Or if they did, it did not make its way to the higher-ups that revoke developer certs.
We should still reward/praise companies who make decisions that are morally superior to their competitors, regardless of whether the morality itself was a primary motivation.
Humans might have too short lifespans, memories and limited rationality for the long term benefit of morality to be strongly in our individual self interest though... one of the possible benefits of anti-aging and cognitive enhancement tech is it might incentivize us to be more moral all other things equal as a side effect.
1) Public sentiment is hammering companies for perceived privacy violations
2) Our business model does not rely heavily on selling user data
3) Make public statements about how much we value privacy at literally no cost to us
4) Get in a good dig at our competition at the same time
1. Lists of people who have purchased [music genre] from iTunes & listened on Pandora is for sale by data brokers, and
2. App developers (they specifically call out Pandora) who use the MediaFramework API have access to iTunes library metadata that they can then collect.
I haven’t looked at Apple’s Developer Agreement recently but I suspect Pandora (and potentially others) hasn’t complied with the terms.
We recently went back to PC's and it was immediately obvious we needed wall to wall antivirus protection which was not always the case on macs.
"We are not going to keep any data at all about you unless we are forced to do so legally. We are bound by that contract with you when you purchase our device."
Then followed that with
"We're going to make it as hard as humanly possible for anyone else to collect and keep data about you if you own one of our devices. Including both legal and technical solutions and we will sue them for breach."
As it is, we're praising "least worse" which is effing awful. Apple's excrement stinks less than some others, eat it up!
But of course Apple literally wrote the book on selling their customers as product to third parties. They've been wildly successful at it. Microsoft, IBM look on in envy at how they've managed to get away with it.
Since it has been massively profitable for them to turn their customers into their product, they see no reason to change and I guess why should they? Profit maximisation is their business, yours and my health and welfare is only of interest in service to maximising profit. If they did anything else they might be guilty of securities fraud(!) So yeah, they can be completely horrific and still win the PR battle because others seem even worse.
I see these statements of fact are always jarring for people to notice for the first time, especially if they quite like the machines (I do), and quite like liberal democracy and free market economics (again I do!) and more so that this utter hideousness is our best option right now because there is no option even remotely on the same planet as good. It is thoroughly depressing all round.
Sure, Apple has more leverage, considering their size, but that also comes with its own set of problems. Plus, their customers have nowhere to go to in protest - all other phones are full of conflict minerals too.
I feel sick when apple says they are deeply committed to upholding human rights, while they continue manufacturing electronics, because I need authenticity. I would like Apple to use more of their resources to figure out how to do conflict-free consumer electronics.
I would like that as well, but I understand how that's difficult for them to do, too: making public that you're working on that, is also making public the deficiencies you have in that area currently - something many consumers are not aware of, and of which they may think it applies only to you.
That's why initiatives like Fairphone's are good. That said, I've followed their blog [1] for a while, and occasionally they've been part of initiatives of which other phone manufacturers have been part as well (I recall something about Nokia and Congo). I think they just don't publicise that for the reasons I outlined above.
Apple charges $1k for their monitor stands. I think they can afford to build their stuff at a factory that doesn't use modern slavery.
Apple certainly wasn't looking out for their users' privacy and security when they let an iTunes bug go unfixed for 3 years (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8912714/Apple-iT... for more). That bug was said to allowed government spying. Apple's iPhone back door lets Apple delete a user's apps (per http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3358134/Apples-Jobs-co...) but Steve Jobs said it was okay because we can trust Apple ("Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull."). Back doors aren't moral, they exist to grant another party over the device the user bought and should own.
The root of all of this is the power of proprietary software (software the user can't inspect, share, or modify, and in some particularly restrictive cases can't always run). Proprietary software is unjust power over the user. There's nothing moral about proprietary software.
And in any case, there is a checkbox in the software update preferences labelled "Install system data files and security updates" which presumably allows you to opt out of these critical security updates.
And if you really wanted to have the zoom backdoor server run on your system, you could probably just strip the code signature and run it manually. Apple isn't stopping you from running whatever software you want on the Mac. Apple is helping all those users that don't follow Hacker News to keep their Mac safe.
That seems highly unlikely to me. Do you have evidence to support that assertion.
On first use "Do you want us to automatically remove apps we think might damage your system: Y/n."
Don't users need a notification, at least, to inform their choices when installing software.
I guess Apple Computers would rather you just mindlessly relied on them, however, so anything that lets users know that Apple's system exposed them from risk is going to be avoided.
Every relative who never installs updates. I ask them why they are on an old version with major security holes that were on the news, but they just don't care. They always click "later".
Sorry, but this is absurd. Automatic security updates are necessity. And no user read through all changelogs of all updated software (except extremely critical systems).
Maybe you wanted to argue for ability to downgrade and disable updates?
It should be up to the user to decide whether to take on updates, regardless of what you think because that's their computer and not yours and you each deserve control over the computers you own. Just as freedom of speech means sometimes people will say things you disagree with, free software computers means not everyone will keep up with the updates. But not offering software freedom is unethical and neither Zoom nor Apple are distributing software freedom. Apple has a clear record of using the power of a proprietor to expose their users to harm (more examples at https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.html ) and this story is an example of how Zoom apparently does as well.
What you and other posters are tellingly refusing to address is the immorality of software nonfreedom. As I wrote before, this is the core of the issue.
Which is why the user can CHOOSE to have automatic updates. Or not to. The default when buying a new Mac is that automatic updates are enabled, because that’s the product Apple wants to sell and that they believe most of their users want to buy. It’s secure, it’s practical, it’s fun.
If you want to be your own IT department you simply deactivate all or some automatic updates. If you want a secure computer and trust Apple you leave it on.
I don’t see how this is a big moral question at all. Let people organize their computing needs in a way that’s safe and practical for them, not in the way that’s safe and practical for you.
There's nothing accurate about this description.
The user can turn off all update checking, or use the granular permissions to just turn off silent security updates.
>To allow macOS to update automatically, go to System Preferences > Software Update, then check Automatically keep my Mac up to date. The Mac offers some more granular update options than iOS. If you click Advanced…, you see a number of options:
https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/everything-you-need...
If you only want to turn off silent security updates, the option to uncheck is "Install system data files and security updates".
What Apple did here is also a dark pattern. We cannot commend them and normalize this behavior.
This is a dictatorial one-sided decision by Apple. What else can they do? Can nation state governments compel Apple to push stuff silently? Can this system be abused by hackers?
Why are we dependent on the good moral behavior of Apple business decision makers for the well-being of our digital lives? Haven't we learnt anything at all from all the incidents in the recent past w.r.t trust in corporate benevolence?
On the other hand, Apple itself is guilty of not addressing gatekeeper vulnerability in time (is still yet to fix this bug): https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/25/macos-gatekeeper-vulnerabilit...
Why are you using "we"? I for one am quite happy how Apple manages Gatekeeper.
"By using the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and install automatic updates onto your computer and your peripheral devices. You can turn off automatic updates altogether at any time by changing the automatic updates settings found within System Preferences."