Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

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> Blaming Apple? Why, when Zoom is on the Play Store as well?

Blame Apple because they constantly tout the iPhone as being "privacy respecting" and "what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone"[0], while they

A. Apple doesn't default to "limit tracking", or at least make "limit tracking" an option on setup/iOS upgrade

B. Apple doesn't penalize developers for using Facebook's SDK with auto data collection (ie. punishment by having text like "sends data to: facebook, google, hotjar" on an app's install page)

C. Apple doesn't do any software stuff to limit and track the trackers. Having a counter for # of total days a domain name was contacted would be an eye-opener for many, and being able to toggle a "block" on the domain would be a big step forward.

Facebook meets the standard for being included in apps (respects the user resetting the usage ID), but that standard isn't the standard privacy-conscious users want. Apple can do better, but whether it be industry pressure or monetary pressure [google paying to be the default search engine], they don't actually put privacy first.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-ces-ad-las-vegas-misl...

> the Facebook SDK was collecting device information unnecessary for us to provide our services.

Sorry state of Apple App security and privacy - all your apps are swarms of data collection and privacy abuses.

Apple built this world - and Apple is to blame. Zoom is to blame too. And finally individual app developers should also alert everyone on what's truly happening in their apps.

While I have zero love for any given hyper capitalistic business like Apple, Android is not any better on the whole in this space, and in some ways measurably worse (especially when you take into account what devices actually hold the largest market share)

This is true, but Apple touts how much better they are about Privacy, and charges a premium for it. Google is more up front that they make little money on the initial sale, and are dependent on advertising to make money.

> Privacy is built in from the beginning. Our products and features include innovative privacy technologies and techniques designed to minimize how much of your data we — or anyone else — can access

https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/

Apple sells privacy, brags about privacy - yet Privacy is abused in from the beginning in the store apps.

And the lesson is - you can't buy privacy but you can sell it.

No. Apple charged a premium well before they started talking about privacy.

I once had to integrate a third party tracking framework to an Android app. The PM wanted to track everything, even the apps that were installed on the device. Google immediately took our app down because of that.

And preventing this from happening with SSL pinning is not a barrier for Google or Apple because they can easily bypass that.

Since they have the means to inspect the traffic at scale then they should be able to filter out apps that are violating your privacy.

It seems whoever is gathering that info and sending it is Facebook

Blame them. Not Apple

You can't have a walled garden and not be responsible for the things that take place in it

However you have to be much more intrusive on developers if you are going to require semantic analysis of all data being sent to see if it was justified and whether it was mentioned in a (plain text, localized potentially into many languages) privacy policy.

I agree. People who send this data externally are ultimately responsible. Hypothetically, If I use the internet to steal data from my employer it’s not the network teams fault for allowing it to happen. I’m just a thief in position of trust exploiting my capabilities.

Agreed. Apps on iOS (IMO) should have to declare what domains they'll access and otherwise get no other network access with special exceptions for browsers and network tools. I hope Apple will prevent apps from seeing SSIDs. I also hope Apple will come up with some similar solution for bluetooth so that apps can only see the devices the user selects and not just scan for all devices.

> declare what domains they'll access and otherwise get no other network access

So Facebook will just provide an SDK for app developers to integrate server-side that lets their app send the data to their own domain, and the server passes it on to FB. Developers will install it, because they want the analytics and ad conversion tracking. There probably isn't a great technical solution to this problem.

This would be leagues better than what we have now since we know that (at least a handful of) companies don't know or actively audit what their SDKs are doing - the Zoom situation here has plausible deniability. If they requires some server-site SDK to do this, some/many would do it, but that increases the cost of running the SDK and there wouldn't be any way to say "we didn't know FB used us as a privacy trojan".

Apple's browser is privacy respecting. The app universe is still the wild west. IDFA is terrifying because you can do out-of-band lookups with third parties and you'd NEVER KNOW. At least with cookies you can trace the information flows.

Not just that Apple has actually started to sell users' data to Goldman Sachs as well. The worst part is, this is opt-in. Not opt out. And opt out is incredibly so backward that you need to email some address instead of just clicking a button.

So I don't see how they're a "privacy respecting company" either. It's just marketing BS.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/24/apple-card-gets-updated-pr...

I'm not sure you read the article you linked to properly:

> Apple is changing the privacy policy for Apple Card with iOS to share a richer, but still anonymized set of data with Goldman Sachs in order to allow the creation of a new credit assignment model, which could expand the group of users that may be able to secure credit. > There is also a beefed up fallback method in the works that will allow users to share more personal data on an opt-in basis with Goldman Sachs if you do not at first get approved

So anonymised by default.

Opt-in, IF you want to share more personal data.

Do you also understand it's Goldman Sachs that run the credit cards, accounts, etc, they're not just randomly sharing data with Goldman Sachs?

It’s an opt-out:

“You can opt out of this use or your Apple relationship information by emailing our privacy team at dpo@apple.com with the subject line ‘Apple Relationship Data and Apple Card.’”

Opt-out of sending anonymised data, to the company providing the credit service.

It doesn't matter how anonymized they claim it to be, it should be opt-in, not opt-out. Of course virtually nobody would choose to opt-in, which is the point.

> it should be opt-in, not opt-out

Sure, it would be nice if no company ever shared data with any other company, but that does not track in this case.

People signing up for an Apple branded Goldman Sachs credit card shouldn't be surprised or affronted by the fact Goldman Sachs gets anonymised data from Apple.

Why the hell anyone would sign up for this crap is beyond me. But it's not a reason to drag Apple into the context of a thread about a company guilty of basic privacy failures -- sending personal data to a 3rd party social network the user has no connection to.

Please also understand what 'anonymised' means, it means _not reversible_ i.e. you _cannot_ tell who the user is.

Have you never heard of deanonymization? In many cases you most certainly can. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.09897.pdf

Of course, but that suggests Apple isn't smart enough to know this and hasn't sufficiently anonymised the data, which is pure speculation?

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