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Comment by yholio | Hacker News Reader

Apple has no love for privacy nor ever had. They are in a market position where their main competitors - Google primarily, Microsoft and Amazon - are highly dependent on revenue streams extracted by monetizing personal information.

Apple is in a position to cut that stream without affecting its bottom line, so it does it and claims privacy as a core value.

I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, but I have no doubt that the tables could switch at any time.

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When Apple launched iOS 6, it was the first operating system to include per-app privacy controls around access to things like microphone, camera, photos, etc. Controls we consider fundamental today. It did not mention it a single time in any of its PR or marketing at all. The first reference you find to it will be from Apple blogs who were surprised to stumble upon it in the iOS 6 beta. It took Android two more years to launch a similar feature.

Yes, Apple is doubling down on its competitive advantage here. But to claim it does not and never cared for privacy is just ignoring the facts and the history. It moved the industry forward.

If you’re curious about more of the history (now, almost a decade ago), this was the scandal that likely motivated the above:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/2/7/2782947/path-ios-app-user-...

Congresspeople sent letters to app developers as a result (not even Apple, ha). iOS 6 was then seeded to the public four months after that article.

But! It actually goes earlier than this. Apple started phasing out access to device identifiers used to track users across apps in iOS 5: https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-ud...

(again, none of this was marketed to anyone)

If it was seeded 4 months after the article, it had absolutely nothing to do with the article.

Yes, that makes sense, development timelines for these features are often far longer than we imagine.

The first except for Blackberry. Before IOS or Android even existed Blackberry had granular per app permissions.

I don't disagree with your argument though, of the modern mobile OSs Apple moved to towards the per-app model before everyone else. I just find it interesting when Apple or Android gets coverage/credit for a feature that has long existed but was forgotten or ignored.

The problem is BB wasn't around by the time smartphones became more than a niche product.

The list of prior work that influenced Apple, or any tech company, is usually far too long to list.

>The list of prior work that influenced Apple, or any tech company, is usually far too long to list.

Agreed, but that doesn't mean we should default to "Apple was the first" simply because we can't wrap our heads around the pre-iPhone days.

Actually, BB10 had an even better feature, you could provide dummy data to wrapped Android applications. So you could fill the Android contact data with an empty contact list and the app would be none-the-wiser. This feature was never advertised.

But noone bought the phones so who cares?

I did not know this, thanks for teaching me something new! It goes at least back to BlackBerry OS 4, running on the BlackBerry Pearl, released in 2008 (but likely further back):

> You can set permissions that control how third-party applications on your BlackBerry device interact with the other applications on your device. For example, you ca control whether third-party applications can access data or the Internet, make calls, or use Bluetooth® connections.

https://www.t-mobile.com/support/public-files/images/legacy/...

That's not true at all. Even early Nokia (Symbian) or Blackberry phones had fine grained permission prompts. As did early Android, actually, but they were deemed to annoying for users.

Apple does deserve credit for leading and influencing Android in this regard, but neither the concept nor the implementation is new.

Do you have a link to the Android thing? I'd be curious to learn more. I always thought early Android had transparency (showing what an app uses) but no control over changing it.

This comment has no basis of truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

Jobs @ D8

People are quick to forget because back then everyone (including HN) was praising Google for everything under the sun.

In that video, Steve mentions the fact that iOS had location permission prompts before iOS 6 – is that what you are referring to as incorrect? Because that is a good catch, permission prompts were present at least as early as iOS 4.2:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/clloc...

EDIT: Oh, I see, if you are referring to the PR or marketing portion, I think it is certainly clear that Apple had a pro-privacy stance, but that did not make its way into the company's _consumer_ marketing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120718122643/http://www.apple....

Android had permission system before iOS implement it, but it was just a prompt for list of permissions at install time so not much worth like current one.

Having been a programmer through the 90's, and watched Microsoft (and Oracle, et. al.) through their most malfeasant years, I'm very cautious about giving companies the benefit of the doubt. However, the fact that Apple is leaving hundreds of billions of dollars on the table by NOT monetizing their aggregated user data does seem to indicate that their will is strong here, and that "they" mean what "they" say about privacy. The kind of money they AREN'T making from this move would try any mortal's soul.

Or it wouldn’t really be that much more. How do you come up with hundreds of billions of dollars? Who are the buyers?

Advertisers. It's always advertisers.

I believe it's based on Google's income derived from advertising, on financial statements.

Isn't "it's in our financial interests right now" about as much "love" as you'll get for anything by a corporation? Saying "Apple has no love for privacy, they're only doing it because it sells" sounds moot to me, every company only does things because they sell.

By choosing which markets you operate in and which products you develop you have a fair bit of influence which things are in your "financial interest".

E.g. creating a company with a business model which benefits from taxing CO2 emissions (Tesla) is morally great. Whereas having a business model which benefits from cheap oil (VW) is less so. Product decisions (electric vs. fuel engines) have a large effect on your long-term financial interests.

If Apple knew it could make more money in say for example, arms dealing, wouldn't it be obliged to pivot to serve the shareholders? I guess it's somewhat democratic as shareholders could vote against it for moral reasons

No. Not all corporate actions have to be aligned to maximal profit extraction.

It’s never just about “more money”. It’s about time-discounted, risk-adjusted “more money”. Doing morally repugnant things increases risk substantially. This is not the risk profile the owners signed up for.

This change may even depress the stock price directly as disgusted owners sell (this harms the ability of current shareholders to earn a return, as the loss is now but the future revenues are discounted).

The market is as moral as its shareholders, which is far less than perfection but a lot better than zero.

No.

The case in question is Dodge vs. Ford and rather than believe memes about it just read the darn wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

> The case in question is Dodge vs. Ford and rather than believe memes about it just read the darn wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

I'm all for pointing someone to the sources, but let's not instill the idea that consulting Wikipedia is doing substantially more diligent research than looking at memes.

No. The common refrain of "but publicly-traded corporations have to maximize shareholder value" is a myth, not a law.

There are bits in the law about management having a fiduciary duty to shareholders, but that mainly means that they aren't supposed to be stuffing their own pockets at the expense of investors. There's a wide birth for management to decide what kinds of profit are and are not worth it.

In common speech, "love" is expected to last eternal, not just to the end of the quarter. I'm not really a romantic, but using the word "love" in a corporate context defiles it.

Companies are made up of and run by people and the decisions made by those people are not necessarily solely profit-driven.

That doesn't mean that making money is not important to these people; of course it is. But it's not the only factor.

Corporations are owned by shareholders, aren't they the ones who ultimately make decisions?

Only nominally. In practice you will have a board and executives and managers who are subject to the conflicts of interest inherent to the principal-agent relationship. This is a major problem of economics.

That's quite an extreme-end of capitalist way of looking at it.

Companies build a vision or image for how they behave and a lot of that is going to be driven by marketability.

For example Microsoft has taken a very pro-developer stance since Satya Nadella took over. Not just because it's directly profitable to be pro-developer, but because it helps their long term image, culture etc. This goes a long way to explaining a lot of their recent actions like helping Github be available in Iran again and open sourcing large parts of C# / .NET.

So the question becomes: are Apple being pro-privacy because it's a long term stance they want to take and make a basis for their company culture because it's something their customers really want. Or are they taking the stance simply because it doesn't impact their own profitability right now, but would drop it if there was an obvious potential income stream.

> Not just because it's directly profitable to be pro-developer, but because it helps their long term image, culture etc.

And thus is indirectly profitable.

> That's quite an extreme-end of capitalist way of looking at it.

It's only extreme if you can show that companies routinely take the moral stance even when it impacts their short- or long-term profitability. Is Microsoft good now despite its best interests, just because it decided to take a moral stance?

ironically, most of these companies are out of China because they don't want to comply with Chinese laws. Not apple https://applecensorship.com/

"Brain test game was deleted from the Chinese App Store".

These are just changes to the app catalog, what reason do we have to believe that a bunch of brain training apps being dropped or withdrawn is evidence of censorship? Has any of this been verified with the App publishers?

> ironically, most of these companies are out of China

Of the three companies named:

- Google's user-facing services (search, email, app store, docs, ...) are blocked, but Google Ads (which are censored) and Android (which comes without any content that would require censorship) are still sold.

- Microsoft: I'm not aware of any of their products being unavailable. Windows is the dominant desktop operating system in China, and I'd be surprised if the app store wasn't censored. Bing search results are definitely censored (they tell you so at the bottom of the page).

- Amazon isn't selling much that could run afoul of censorship, except possibly books (remember when Amazon used to be an online bookstore?) but in China their market is mostly targeted at the niche of high-end imported goods. (Note the country-of-origin indicators on https://www.amazon.cn/ )

Worse than this, and to the point of this post - you can’t offer comms service in China unless it has a way to be snooped by government. So some comm services like Skype have to offer a separate app, just for China, which affects all messages sent and received by users of this version of the app, even if it comes from a regular app.

I was telling my friends who moved from China and kept their iPhones, to just buy a new one... just in case...

Google doesn't certify devices in the Chinese market which run Android. Android is open source. Devices made for the domestic Chinese market run versions of Android created by the manufacturers and lack Google apps and services.

The majority of Android phones manufactured in China are not intended for the domestic market but are exported, and do come with Google apps and services, which Google licenses to the manufacturers.

no idea why I thought facebook is on that list too... There is AWS in China, but you need to sign "special agreement"

Apple is leaving a massive amount of money on the table by not monetizing user data or using it to serve ads. They are by far the most privacy focused of the large tech companies, though they're obviously not perfect.

The only way to do better than Apple is a full FOSS stack, and that comes with different challenges and is more of a hassle to maintain.

> Apple is in a position to cut that stream without affecting its bottom line, so it does it and claims privacy as a core value.

Well, the GP has a quite damming list showing that it doesn't. It's only empty marketing.

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