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Comment by jhanschoo | Hacker News Reader

The relevance of criticism on Apple's privacy stance is in pointing out the limits of Apple's commitment to privacy.

Companies like Signal are founded on privacy and encryption, but with Apple, privacy is a nice-to-have, limited to its other business objectives (like how Apple is "committed" to reducing waste to the extent it can sell dongles, chargers, and earbuds separately, but not in terms of repairability). You can count on Apple to value the appearance of privacy, and in protecting information from third parties without user consent, but not so much being private from Apple itself.

For example, here's an article on Apple and privacy from a couple months ago https://www.politico.eu/article/apple-privacy-problem/ .

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>and in protecting information from third parties without user consent

Is this true for every country where Apple operates? Especially where it's forced to host servers in? We know for certain that Apple cannot do its business in certain high value market(s) unless it offers unrestricted access to its customer's data.

But we don't see *privacy applicable to U.S. or X countries only disclaimer in any of it's marketing or promo materials. An uninformed Journalist or Human rights activist can be at severe risk due to this.

Especially when,

> Cook argued that people choose iOS specifically so they won’t have to make risky decisions with sensitive data.[1]

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/22/22448139/tim-cook-epic-fo...

Apple's marketing is quite genius. They spun iOS being a closed system into a plus.

You can't install your own apps. Safari is not fit for PWAs. Repairability is not encouraged. All of this is for your own benefit and privacy. Want those things? Go to Android and sacrifice your privacy.

With this approach, Apple comes out looking privacy-focused, justified for their App Store fees, and their stance on right to repair.

I'm not educated enough to know if those restrictions are absolutely needed for privacy or privacy is a blanket excuse for how Apple operates.

It's more of an opportunity left by Google. If Google wasn't a spyware company masquerading as a search engine company, their team of brilliant engineers could create the most open, most reputable, most user friendly, and most privacy protecting system on the planet.

I still hope something like this happens one day. There is definitely a need for privacy-enabled Android that is compatible with major brands. I'd gladly pay €50 more for it. This system would have to be mostly API-compatible with Android so that developers could easily recompile their apps for it. There is a huge smoking hole waiting to be filled. Librem 5 (when it's released...) is simply not enough and frankly speaking simply too expensive for a popular privacy solution.

And at the same time, MacOS phones home every time you run anything, and logs exactly what you ran, on what you ran it, and where you ran it. Inb4: "This isn't a privacy issue, it's a security feature".

It's a great read. Why not link to it?

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

To be completely honest, I was about to, but got distracted. Thanks for linking it.

I think the distinction nowadays is what happens with the data after it has been collected. We are way past data being collected.

Running on linux, with software I can to a fairly large extent control, I beg to differ. This is also the default, and not some crazy power-user iptables/proxy filter shenaningans either.

There are positive and negative aspects to it being a closed system, just as there are positive and negative aspects of Android's open system. Marketing just chose to emphasize the positive aspects. Not really a genius play, IMO, that's just what any marketing team does.

Good point, but iOS was a closed system from the get-go and this was seen a drawback of iOS back then. The privacy focused marketing started 3-4 years ago.

Speaking of which it is a little weird that Apple sells iOS on having superior privacy to an Android device when Safari will still frequently hit a Google CDN in order to load open-source fonts that they could readily just ship themselves.

Maybe this is just a shallow read of it, but it feels like sort of a similar dichotomy to that between Apple's rhetoric about objectionable content on app stores and... well, its inclusion of a web browser.

Yes but the privacy people need to be less angry about it and life in general. When signal makes a phone I will certainly consider it. Until then Apple is the only game that really makes sense that is still mainstream and usable without having to accept a bunch of bugs and subpar performance.

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