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Comment by NaturalPhallacy | Hacker News Reader

ding ding ding

Apple makes money selling devices to people.

Google makes money selling people to advertisers.

As a result Apple's maps and ML assistant aren't as good as Google's which harvests way more of people's data.

I'm perfectly fine with this trade off. Lots of things iPhones do are even presented at as the data never leaving your phone at keynotes/press releases, and ads. A bullet point notably missing from Android phones. I deliberately use Apple's admittedly worse maps application whenever possible because I know it's not telling Big Brother about me when I know Google maps is.

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Edward Snowden revealed that Apple has been part of the PRISM electronic surveillance program since 2012.

I would agree that Apple is significantly better on user privacy than Google or Facebook but that does not mean that the NSA isn’t sucking up all your data from Apple Maps.

Claiming that Apple isn’t “telling Big Brother about me” is at best naive and at worst dangerous misinformation that could put activists and whistleblowers at risk of having their location data harvested by the US war machine.

A fair point. But it's also worth noting that Snowden recommends Signal, and doesn't say "don't use it on an iPhone" as a caveat.

To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.

A fair argument but I don’t think it’s really fair to compare Signal to Apple Maps because IMHO while there is a possibility that the NSA is able to somehow intercept my Signal messages on-device prior to encryption occurring; it is almost a certainty that the NSA has some form of back door access to Apple’s infrastructure and is able to access location/search data from Apple Maps.

This isn’t even really a criticism of Apple, it’s just the reality of the world that we have created since 9/11. I don’t believe any company that operates at Apple’s scale can keep its infrastructure totally private and secure from abuses of user privacy by the state. Especially if that company has infrastructure or employees in countries like the US/UK/China that are notorious for having extrajudicial/illegal/secret/unaccountable surveillance programs.

Totally agree with you on Google, they are the worst by far on user privacy. And we shouldn’t really expect anything different from a company that derives almost its entire revenue from advertising/data AND has been deeply connected to the intelligence agencies from Day 1.

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