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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

As a user I love it. More privacy for me.

As a developer it was a pretty exotic experience. Their OAuth service is unlike any other big name provider I'd used. Some day soon I hope to open source my Apple backend integrations in TypeScript, because Apple provides no backend SDKs, at least not for Node/JS/TS.

Lots of people seem to use Sign In With Apple, though. They make it really nice for the user. The email relay thing is pretty neat.

The thing that troubles me with OAuth is that if you don't provide apps with some other way to sign in and you lose access to you OAuth account, you lose access to all your applications.

It was pretty painless to implement in my case, though I was already familiar with communicating with Apple backend services.

Agree. It's made me sign up for many services that I never would have otherwise.

No. You can't get an Apple ID without providing a phone number, street address, and email address.

That must be recent, I didn’t provide a street address.

The street address is not verified/authenticated, but the email and phone are.

Sure, but you can have an anonymous email address and phone number in the US.

I recall having to provide this around 2013 or so around the time I got an iPhone 5. But possibly it was part of their credit card verification? That could explain why some have been asked and not others.

As with others, I trust Apple to safeguard this information waaaay more than constantly rolling the dice with shady app publishers every time I sign up to something.

That I can sign up to TikTok with "Sign in with Apple", with an auto-generated Apple Privacy email address and literally no other information, is quite amazing and useful.

Apple surrenders customer data on over 30,000 customers per year to the US government without search warrants or probable cause.

This is disclosed in their own transparency report (FISA).

This isn't optional; Apple has to provide data on any user account the USG demands of them, without a search warrant.

Your trust in them is misplaced.

Most of us are more worried about scummy advertisers than three-letter agencies.

Advertisers can't put you in jail indefinitely without trial because you published something they didn't like.

The USA IC can and will.

Yes, but the odds of that are quite low for the overwhelming majority of us.

All companies operating in the US are going to be subject to the same.

I’m not sure what your point is. This is unavoidable for any company subject to FISA or you know, laws.

I care far more about companies like Google and Facebook taking my information and using it in tracking and advertising, or selling it to whomever wants to pay for it for whatever reason to build a profile about me and using that to take advantage of me.

On that front, I trust Apple far more than any of the other options. They’re using it as a competitive advantage and it’s working.

Did you want Apple to have the power of the Dutch East India Company? How else would Apple resist national governments?

They could not collect the information in the first place, especially for free customers who just want to download free apps.

Or how about this, be able to install free apps without any apple ID!

Where does it say that this information was provided on demand without a warrant? The only exception to a warrant requirement is a FISA letter, and all US persons are required by law to respond to those.

And in terms of NSLs, they only turned over data for under 500 of them so far this year (and it could be a lot fewer since the bucket size is 1-500).

How do you get an Apple ID without a street address? There are still places in the US that don't have street addresses, even after 911 attempts.

This is a serious question since many of our students don't have a street address. Many reservations only have PO Boxes.

A P.O. Box address should be fine.

Lol, privacy? You think that's what it is?

Apple forces you to use in-app purchases, Apple forces you to stick with their crippled browser ecosystem, it has no compatibility outside of Apple. Their protocols for messaging and device interop are closed-source; they have tech that tracks all your devices + these new beacons, and all your devices are those beacons too.

You are more heavily tracked under Apple than you are in any other system. Did you think your iphone would be a location tracker for another device?

You're mixing up "privacy from Apple" and "privacy from random third-party developers when using 'Login with Apple' specifically".

You could have saved yourself a fair amount of embarrassment with just a little bit of reading. Apple can’t decrypt beacon locations. https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/security/sece994d0126/...

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