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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone in the tech community still under the illusion that Apple is in any way a privacy company?

> in any way a privacy company

More than the alternatives.

No, not more than AOSP and self hosting. And the difference between Google and Apple is negligible compared to the difference between Apple and DIY.

Sucking slightly less data out of your customers doesn't make you a privacy company.

I feel like that not exactly the same as an alternative company.

Even if I ignore the company aspect the scale of heavy lifting there is pretty big.

I never said anything about alternative companies in my initial comment. I said Apple is not a privacy company, which is true.

What do you mean by "heavy lifting"?

I feel like I don’t understand what you mean by “a privacy company” now.

I’m guessing that is just some unreachable standard?

No, I mean a company that actually has privacy as a core goal, rather than bolted on as marketing term that doesn't actually match reality. Signal is a privacy company in my opinion. If Signal, a non-profit, can figure out how to utilize esoteric intel opcodes to avoid storing any personal information on their services, the multi-trillion dollar Apple, who designs their own CPUs no less, should be able to figure out how not to store identifying info on their servers.

If apple needs identifying info to make their services work, that's fine, but they don't have to falsely sell themselves as a privacy company.

It's not some unreachable standard. They haven't even taken basic steps, like offering crypto payments for certain services, or utilizing on-device storage and encrypted data in the cloud, or open sourcing components that transfer user info.

That's because Apple's concept of privacy is, unfortunately, just not letting third-parties touch your information.

They themselves are above all of this, and their users (for the most part) trust them with their info.

Signal is also a non-profit that requires you to give them your phone number.

They are a privacy focused company that made a small compromise for usability, rather than a giant company that collects massive amounts of data and pays lips service to privacy. Apple made 10 billion on ads in the last year, meaning that they have extensive chronological profiles on probably everyone. Are you really saying that the use of a phone number for verification is an equivalent privacy violation to building an ad network? Signal collects no identifiable data and associates nothing with your phone number, probable through cryptography using Intel SGX features. It's absurd to compare the two.

Why is everyone so interested in arbitrarily defending Apple here?

It's possible to serve ads without compromising privacy: https://searchads.apple.com/privacy/

Google is the one that has "extensive chronological profiles on probably everyone". Apple is the only major company that actively tries not to store anything about its customers. Even Apple Maps retrieves the route in multiple anonymised segments, so that Apple can't know where you went.

Google on the other hand will actively track where you are and ask you to review places you went to. And will "helpfully" send you an email of all the places you visited.

Ok, so how do you explain Apple's operation in China? If they cared about privacy they wouldn't offer their products in China due to the goverment's requirement that they have a spyware on every phone sold there. Even google refused to operate there under those conditions.

Source on the intel opcode thing?

https://medium.com/@maniacbolts/signal-increases-their-relia...

Only Apple allows anyone to track anyone all over the world for $20.

AirTags are literally the only Bluetooth tracker that have mitigations for this. iPhone users will be notified if someone else’s AirTag is following them, and so will android users if they download the Tracker Detect app.

You can find a ton of tracking devices that work "all over the world", none of them tell the one being tracked that someone is tracking them.

usually you have to pay for a mobile internet connection and use GPS... not of them have access to all iphones

Does the price matter?

Otherwise that’s not new / exclusive.

I should be able to track my things.

> I should be able to track my things.

not by using my device

You can opt out. You’re beclowining yourself ranting through this entire thread but not having researched any details

> xref - You can opt out.

track your ex girl friend easily... thanks apple ....

it should be opt-in at the very least

Not sure why HN is so anti-privacy lately

How about this story:

Apple initially launched AirTags with the “find your missing possessions” use case in mind, and didn’t fully anticipate the stalking use case.

When they realised there was a stalking problem, they put in some fairly robust defences against it (see https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/an-update-on-airtag-a...), robust enough that it makes the tags a lot less useful for tracking stolen items.

Do you agree that’s what happened? And if so, what parts of it make Apple anti-privacy? Should they have axed the entire product?

It's too naive to think that Apple, one of the biggest company, hadn't noticed that AirTag could be used for stalking. I suspect that they think it's still fine because competitors like Tile already exists

Maybe they even thought that it would be a good thing that people would stalk at first... then they could implement a semi-effective method to prevent it... and be looked at like heroes

I suggest Hanlon's Razor applies here: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

HN is a microcosm of the world. People support whatever is the norm, because they are social beings. Being privacy focused is "idealist" or "extremist" or "paranoid", and people don't want to be outcasts. And you are a conspiracy theorist for thinking that Apple and Google don't have your best interests at heart. And abuse of Hanlon's razor, etc, etc

Actually, it's more that many of us frequently risk the likely theft of our precious items, the permanent loss of which would be extremely damaging or upending. And the contrived examples of abuse cases are much less compelling, especially when the only alternative, cellular GPS trackers, are even more invasive. And I dare someone to formulate an ethically consistent argument for banning GPS tracking devices.

Reading the comments outside of the article I see no other example where it helped catch a thief but I find one case of possible abuse to track soomeone.

Annecdotic I know, but I guess some of us value the potential abuse of others higher than an hypothetic recovery in case of theft.

I’ll let you know the outcome when someone jacks my custom $7000 bike from its truck bed rack for the second time.

Did you forget about the article?

If Apple is not a privacy focused company for you, what is? Any examples?

Read the thread below, I gave an example and go into detail about Signal.

Apple is close to breaking $10B annual advertising revenue. No advertising company is privacy-friendly, period, they just hobble competitors’ tracking, not their own.

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