Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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

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.

> 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.

Mainline GNU/Linux of course.

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.

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

What's wrong with Yandex phone ?

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com