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Comment by randomperson_24 | Hacker News Reader

I hope fanboys don't start defending Apple / Google for their privacy measures etc. (esp. Apple)

Both platforms are notorious (Apple more so due to its closed nature imo) and defending any is just weird.

Saying that iPhones are secure and private is wishful thinking that benefits nobody but Apple shareholders.

There are no doubt some dead journalists and activists that would still be alive today if iPhones truly were secure and/or private.

Extraordinary assertions require extraordinary proof.

How about this one objective example of Apple > Google in terms of privacy:

iCloud Mail aliases versus Gmail aliases: Google exposes your main address at all times: HeyGuysLookWhoItIs+TotallyNotMe@gmail.com

iCloud lets you have completely different aliases all forwarded to the same main account which no one else ever has to see.

AND you can see which apps have been given which aliases from one convenient list.

But of course facts like this will get buried to maintain the tired “everything sucks the same” narrative here.

Name one

Jamal Kashoggi

He would not be alive today no matter what phone he used.

Hard to say, his phone was the one that ratted him out.

The dude booked an appointment at the Saudi Embassy in advance and walked right into it. What did his phone have to do with it?

The abductors obtained that information through his fiance's iPhone. This iPhone was infected with NSO's Pegasus malware and the infection was executed by sending a zero-click text message with automatic payload delivery. There isn't a notification when the message is received so the fiance wouldn't have known it was happening.

This zero-click iMessage exploit is unique to iPhones.

You missed my point. With an adversary that sophisticated, the actual method of compromise doesn’t matter. If he had an android the result would have been the same. Or a flip phone, or a landline, or if he lived in a cave.

Your point is that the device doesn't matter. If Khashoggi and his fiance had Android devices and used an encrypted messaging app such as Signal (or something similar like Session, Briar, etc.) his abduction would not have occurred as it did (even if MBS and his cohorts had control of an operator at the telecom).

As I said, the zero-click exploit is exclusive to iPhones using iMessage. An Android device that receives a similar SMS requires the user's knowledge and willful intent in order to activate. The last zero-click SMS exploit had been patched back in 2015.

So the device (and protocol) does actually matter.

No, it doesn’t.

It was said that He would be alive if He wasn’t using an iPhone. This is stupid.

The end objective is that Saudi Intel wanted him dead.

If He used Android, an Android zero day might have been used, of which there are many.

In this case, He used an iPhone. A different phone, or no phone, would have made no difference to a state level actor.

The difference is, with a good number of Android phones, you can just flash a custom rom without any tracking built in.

Let’s leave it at “there are android phones”. Unfortunately it is not at all supported for the majority of phones, and for the ones where it is possible, it will result in eg. the purging of camera firmware.

Why not if one is better than they other? There is fanboyism, which is unproductive and then there’s sober comparison of objective measures of privacy. And I want to know which is better. So as long as someone presents facts that help me make a decision I don’t want to censor them.

Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?

If both are bad, does it matter which is less bad?

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Yes definitely. There are a lot of nuances in privacy. As an example, take the approach to ML and assistants, where Google collects most of everything to train models on their servers, while Apple tries to anonymize things a bit (e.g. their “differential privacy” techniques).

Anonymize things a bit sounds like a bit dead and a bit pregnant.

That's my attempt to characterize it fairly, since I'm not a cryptographer and don't know how solid it is. Last I checked there were debates about that.

Well, yes, of course it does.

I'm willing to limit what apps I use and carefully consider what I install. I'm not yet willing to abandon my smartphone.

Choosing the lesser of N evils is a pretty common and often rational choice, in life and in engineering. May be not in this case, and it's good to be unsatisfied, but disregarding the debate just because neither option is great makes no sense.

Choosing the lesser of N evils only makes sense if one is acceptable. If neither is, a choice is useless. Both sides have an unacceptable amount of tracking and your choice doesn't really have any consequences.

Naively, because it only takes two suppliers in a market, for consumers to start playing them against each-other by switching to whichever one plays more to consumer preferences at any given moment, incentivizing the suppliers to compete to satisfy that consumer preference. Like a classical "race to the bottom" that lowers prices, but with some other factor that consumers care about instead of cost.

(Of course, this assumes people bother to switch. In reality, this isn't even true in oligopolist party politics, let alone in oligopolist markets. In practice, there need to be a lot more, smaller options before switching costs are forced down enough to encourage people to switch. In phone markets, this looks like how people switch somewhat easily between different Android device manufacturers for their next phone. If we could get phone Operating Systems working like that, we'd really have something!)

You're welcome to say whatever you want, but if you genuinely believe that the NSA gives preferential treatment to anyone from FAANG you're living a fever dream.

On the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways?

The Chinese and the Russians. Who wants to buy a Yandex phone?

What's wrong with Yandex phone ?

It's not about resources, it's about reach and jurisdiction. If anything, FAANGs have the most incentive to cooperate with the NSA because they're located in the US and have the most to lose.

The companies that can best resist the NSA are located outside of the US and EU.

Apple has had high profile fights with USgov on their privacy stances. Google has not.

And yet they're cooperating with the government all the same. Literally just marketing...

With Google, you at least know what to expect. How many promises has Apple broken now?

You mean they are doing what they are legally required to do by the government? Of course they are.

They are also working around the margins to improve privacy. Google is not.

How many promises has apple broken? #stuffyoumadeup

> You mean they are doing what they are legally required to do by the government? Of course they are.

Well that cut-and-dries it then, I'll be sticking with Android/Linux until Apple puts up a meaningful resistance to government surveillance.

“I’ll stick with the phone made by a company that makes their money off of spying on me.” Ok, sure. Have fun.

Have you been sleeping for the last half year? It was on the front page of HN a bunch of times.

Even this, from an Apple fanboy website: https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/devils-advocate...

What promise did Apple break with CASM? I fully support it. As designed, it shows Apple goes out of their way to protect privacy as much as they do children from being exploited. I proper balance of interests.

Everyone, ostensibly. The only reason why they care about those companies is because they process an insane amount of data on a regular basis, so they will always go for the cheap wins first. I doubt it took any effort to convince Apple and Google to comply, since the alternative would be losing money (not an option to shareholders). Amazon was already under the NSA's thumb the moment they started working with domestic payment processors, and at this point the general public probably knows more sensitive info about Facebook than the NSA does. We could keep going down the Fortune 500 in such a manner, flagging people who process lots of data and determining what actual mitigation they put in place, but you'll quickly realize that they have all the information they need.

Mainline GNU/Linux of course.

> On the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways?

US news orgs have a duty (implied by their extra-Constitutional protections) to ferret out NSA misdeeds but editors/journalists find celebs so much more intriguing.

Christ you seem insufferable. Imagine identifying issues in our media but thinking they are “because calebritiez”

You get what you pay for. I assume the comment refers to free/ad-powered media. I don’t remember the last time I saw a celebrity news line.

Android that’s seen as Android in the mass market is also closed. The AOSP layer may be open source, but all the Google layers that make Android usable (for most people), such as Play Services, the Play Store, and Google apps, are all closed. Not any different from Apple in that respect.

You have to look at what versions of the operating systems they’re looking at and compare that to today. Things change.

“Everything sucks the same, why bother” is the cry of those incapable of nuance, or more commonly, on the losing side.

There are objective reasons where Apple is better at privacy.

For example, one of the things that benefits me the most personally:

iCloud Mail aliases versus Gmail aliases: Google exposes your main address at all times:

HeyGuysLookWhoItIs+TotallyNotMe@gmail.com

What even is the fucking point?

iCloud lets you have completely different aliases all forwarded to the same main account which no one else ever has to see.

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