It's amazing the amount of crap people put up with in exchange for some comforts and conveniences these days (google, apple, amazon). Sad that so very few people put values first
> It’s just exceptionally difficult to quantify what “privacy” is.
No, it’s really not difficult:
Don’t try to learn more about me than what I explicitly choose to tell you myself.
Until you understand that, you'll continue to be "surprised" when people say they care about privacy but not the pet peeve you have.
Is that exceptionally difficult for you to quantify as well?
As someone else said: It isn't that hard at all. Unless, of course, your paycheck is reliant on you not understanding it.
We talk, and you don't go telling other people what we talked about, or keeping ledgers, or training models, etc.
It isn't that hard at all. Unless, of course, your paycheck is reliant on you not understanding it.
defining privacy in a contextually relevant and concise manner is hard.
If you stop at "oh, an HTTP session happened", you're being a disingenuous maker and perpetuate of strawmen. It's almost always what happens with data by actors you invite into that "seemingly private HTTPS transaction" that violate the simplestsocial precept of the technical exchange.
Things branch off from there. If you can't see that as a fundamental breach of privacy and professional discretion, then again, it's likely you have a vested interest in not seeing it. It's damned obvious to anyone who doesn't.
How about asking the users what privacy means to them.
Why is the concept of "consent" so hard to user-hostile devs?
And then only dollar amounts that move the needle (and if your choice negatively impacts the business by only a million dollars ayear, that's an irrelevant difference for Google. They literally don't care, because a million is peanuts, and does not move the needle)
They simply don’t think about their internet browser, their privacy and Google, in the same way most people don’t care about how toilet paper is made. Sure you can make a strong case why something is bad, but in the end people just keep buying the same brand of toilet paper.
The other problem is that every service out there will pretend to treat you with respect and it's only when things go wrong that you learn the truth, by that point it's too late.
So you need to 1) look beyond the price and 2) know which companies lie and which don't when it comes to their marketing (or have a previous experience with them), otherwise they all pretend to treat their customers with respect.
1. A box on a web page
2. Customers write words
3. Your software return a list of web pages that contain said words plus relevant ads.
Since sometime 2007 - 2009 and Google has dropped the requirement that results actually contains the word and it is extremely annoying.
I use DDG these days. They are just as bad, not better or worse but it is faster to add !g to a DDG search than to retype the query in DDG aftee first trying Google.
First other search engine to recreate the Google experience from before 2007 can charge me $10 a month and show ads on top of it and still get me as a happy customer.
I'm not familiar with that term. Does it mean a "Do Yourself In" diagnostic tool?
Which is why Apple devices generally only have ads in third party experiences, and Google shoves ads right in the default mail app.
For Apple services, of course, which raises some pretty intense anti-trust concerns.
There have never been third party ads in any default application on MacOS or iOS and I feel completely confident saying that.
You could make an argument of upselling, the music app prods your for a subscription to Apple Music or to buy songs on itunes- you could argue Apple TV shows content from providers you’re not subscribed to (next to ones which you are)- but those are first and second party ads.
That's what I mean.
> but those are first and second party ads.
But ads are ads.
Apple is more compatible with Privacy rights, but wholly not compatible with ownership rights, portability rights, free speech rights, etc.
Their draconian ecosystem policies around payment, hardware lock in, and platform lock in are IMO just as bad if not worse than Google draconian policies around data privacy
It seems however you do not place any value on anything other than privacy
EDIT: I feel like I should give a shout-out to Pinephone, LineageOS and GrapheneOS as some better options, although they are all obviously not mainline.
They created the app store and made apps ubiquitous.
Honestly, computers used to have so much promise. They helped us, and made us better.
But nowadays how many people have you heard say "I don't WANT to install an app". (I know, lots of people don't care)
And apple is trying to restore (a little) trust by saying they're for privacy.
Thing is, they have to play both sides. And they really can't be for privacy (like allow a firewall or block network access for an app) because then developers won't do anything on their platform.
All you have given is possible reasons Apple might compromise, but those have applied for many years. If they do start compromising then sure, let’s re-evaluate.
The time to re-evaluate is already here, it's just hard to do so when you're already locked into their ecosystem.
Twitter handing over the DMs for a user: very much problematic- they’re plaintext. Apple handing over the iMessage history for a user: much less problematic, it’s E2E encrypted. (though still an issue - metadata may still be plain)
Fundamentally it boils down to some trust level - how much of what apple says about their data storage is true?
> The question is, how much data do they hold that they can tune over.
https://www.androidcentral.com/apple-may-have-ditched-encryp...
Exactly. You just summed up why capitalism works in a single brilliant sentence.
Apple mostly makes money by selling you goods. Privacy can become a feature of those goods, increasing its value. They are incentivized to protect privacy.
This doesn't make Apple better. It's just that they're in a different market.
(Especially true when you see people continue to think their business model is still to sell you iPhone, Apple is no longer just an iPhone company anymore )
Many of these makes me uneasy. Especially when we have caught Tim Cook lying multiple times.