Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

They say he's taking a swing at facebook without naming them.

They've missed the fact that every single thing they've excerpted there applies equally to google. Algorithm, engagement, conspiracy theory, disinformation, recommendations to more of the same is precisely what YouTube does. For both "With a computer" in the description which is necessary for how recommendation algorithms work has again caused the overwhelming majority of politicians, public servants, commentators to have their brain fall out of their ear. These recommendation algos were censoriship before censorship suddenly got cool a few weeks ago.

Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple. You'd have to be stone cold crazy to trust Apple now and forever into the future and they are hoarding your data every chance they get themselves with zero consequences beyond PR if they change their policy tomorrow, next year or in 5 years time.

Separately to that, I've never seen a (directly paid for) advert for apple product on the internet. Plenty on the tv. A plethora of manipulated 3rd rate news pieces [1]. Do they advertise on the internet at all? They seem to be very good at advertising.

[1] Is there anyone in Apple's league for convincing news outlets to run their advertisments for free? Elon Musk, for sure. Is he even better? Anyone else? Donald Trump's political advertising maybe? What have you noticed that I might have missed here?

>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple

The demands from privacy by Apple are right, just combine them with anti-trust measures like open APIs that break Apples walled garden down and the internet would be useable again. It'd be pretty easy to get rid of both censorship and restore people's privacy if the will was there.

>>Save us from being protected from censoriship by Apple

>The demands from privacy by Apple are right

Apple still collect the data. They can change their policies to do literally anything with that data anytime they like. Apple deciding what is good for me is something I neither need nor want.

Apple don't pay tax, they do pay lobbying and political donations while courting the favour of politicians. That's a problem in my eyes. Apple have a huge interest in downplaying it. Do you really think they won't? They could do that quite thoroughly without the people at apple who see it differently to me even noticiing they were doing it. Tweak some algos, back test, that's great there's no problem there, push the release button.

I think Facebook is going to go after them on antitrust. I know a lot of the scam billers are going to be as well.

There have also been outcrys against the non genuine battery notices - getting rid of that will let the China battery folks in more for better and worse.

The big risk to apple - right now you don't have to think too much - there's a lot of trust. If the open everything up they may lose what people are willing to pay for in terms of trust as folks have to navigate more complicated business relationships

For me forcing them to open up APIs doesn't mean they lose anything. It'd simply separate the frontend from the backend. They could still provide their own clients and people who love the Apple brand and trust them can use them, I wouldn't even object to them shipping as the default experience on their phones. (something windows got punished for heavily when they bundled browsers, but think about how much less serious that was compared to the restrictions on phones)

All it'd do is offer up an alternative of stores or apps to interface with Apple for people who want it. For example have a chat app that seemingly bridges Android services and iMessage.

This is a big part of Apple's appeal for a lot of folks. They do not allow carriers to put ANY software AT ALL onto their phones. There is NO "open API" for carriers to load malware or replacement app stores through or root level apps or anything.

If you want that fair enough - plenty of android phones allow you to root them and do whatever (and of course the carriers use these open API's to do the same). I know some lifeline phones came with Android/Trojan.HiddenAds. and Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX and plenty of other phones use these open api's for "enhancements" many of which are not removable.

Apple does not have any open API, and so distributors, carriers etc cannot "enhance" the phone. That turns out to be something that people are paying EXTRA for. The margins on apple's phones are nuts as a result - they charge FAR more for the same spec as another provider - because you can trust that phone through the supply chain FAR more than you can trust any other phone provider currently. Similarly, you can be an older phone, you can give them to your kids, etc and the quality is there. Resold iphones hold value much MORE, not less, then the more open phones from others (which often have a trash battery installed just before sale which dies in a few weeks).

In your open API world would facebook have to follow app store policies on data collection, user permissions, single point of cancelation?

On Apple's own store, sure. In fact in an open-API world Apple could make their store as secure, as walled, and as privacy respecting as they wanted and we would never need to even debate if Apple abuses their market position. I'd also be perfectly fine with letting Apple demand that phones ship in a factory default state or alternatively outlaw pre-installed apps because you're right that most of it is trash.

However once the phone has reached the user I do not see at all how open protocols reduce Apple's appeal to people who want to exclusively use Apple software. You can simply do just that.

Would Microsoft be more valuable if we all could only install software through the windows store and the OS was locked down? Nobody would claim that. Third party apps are what adds marginal value to the phone. This is precisely why Apple let's third party developers put apps on their phone, something that Jobs for example initially opposed. He wanted to build everything in-house.

I think Apple is valuable for a lot of reasons. They have a great sense of aesthetic, user friendliness, UX, great hardware, but I do not believe at all that a lack of software raises the value of the phone. If you had a universal chat app that interfaces with all other proprietary protocols on your phone right now, your phone would be worth more.

I think you vastly overestimate power individual users have to force change on people like facebook.

What you propose means that if facebook doesn't like the anti-tracking rules, they can go around them. If your cable company doesn't like the anti-location awareness features to target ads to you if you stream their show, they can go around that. If a biller doesn't like that users can ask for a 30 day heads up on subscription renewals, they can do their own app store.

It is only because Apple (as a whole) as enough market power that - my subscription show notifications prior to renewal. That all of a sudden I can sign in to a bunch of apps with an apple sign in THAT DOES NOT RELEASE MY EMAIL. That all of a sudden privacy labels are appearing next to apps. And the list goes on. NONE of this would happen if these other folks were in charge, there is much more money in exploiting users.

So yes, apple is using its market power to push back on behavior they don't believe makes sense for their average user base. You are a power user, able to navigate all options - jump on andorid, root it, and do what you want.

I think the internet is far from perfect in its current state. However, I think implying it is not usable might be pretty hyperbolic.

They definitely run ads on YouTube, I’ve seen them in the times where uBlock was unavailable.

It seems like Facebook is getting the most bad press, but anything that hurts Facebook hurts google even more, because Google is basically the same formula but twice as big as Facebook.

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