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Comment by Jcowell | Hacker News Reader

> Advertising gets a bad rap, but I like to believe I am providing value to my customers and they wouldn't have found my product otherwise. Who was hurt?

Probably. But if the means in which you can connect with those customers requires a surveillance apparatus that infringes on the privacy of the unconsented than perhaps the question that should be asked is does your business have a greater right to exists than the privacy of those customers (I’m guessing the reason you can’t reach them anymore is because they decided to no longer be tracked.

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It's a moot-point. Switching away from AdSense isn't going to protect you from surveillance, it's just going to change the pool of customers buying your information. All your iCloud data is a few clicks away for most NSA employees, and I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that they also have root capabilities on your iPhone. No matter how you slice it, Apple isn't going to give you privacy. The data you hold near-and-dear is already in adversarial hands. The game is lost before you even put your chips on the table, that's the consequence of agreeing with TOSes for more than a decade. Nobody wants to admit it, but privacy is literally unattainable in a digital era.

What Apple sells is security. They do a fairly good job with security, and their whitepapers are almost industry-leading. Their commitment to privacy is entirely lip service though, and the volume of their marketing seems to indicate the emptiness of that promise.

What part of opt-in advertising IDs is only lip service to privacy? Seems entirely about privacy and very little about security. Similarly, iCloud Private Relay is completely privacy focused and isn't really about security at all. Both of these things provide real value to consumers and dramatically limit data collection as evidenced by reports from Facebook and many others in recent quarters.

NSA data collection isn't anywhere close to equivalent to private companies storing it. The NSA programs could be shut down if the political will existed. Private companies with all of this data have absolutely zero oversight under US law at the moment.

> All your iCloud data is a few clicks away for most NSA employees, and I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that they also have root capabilities on your iPhone.

There is still value for most people in being able to limit personal data access from many data brokers even if that data is still potentially accessible by the NSA. It’s a spectrum and not a binary outcome.

You are right though our rights to the data we create for most services have been relinquished via the TOSs that no one is really expected to read. It’s certainly broken. However I still think there are steps one can take to resist cross linking of that data by companies; it does take a bit of effort though which isn’t realistic for most.

While I think Apple’s choice to support privacy are ultimately self serving it is still beneficial for many consumers (at least for now).

> is a few clicks away for most NSA employees

I'd rather have NSA employees having access to my data rather than NSA employees and employees of the hundreds/thousands of players in the digital advertising ecosystem.

I'd rather have the digital advertising ecosystem have my info and the NSA have none.

I can say no to ads through self discipline. They can't force me to give them money.

The NSA can come with guns to lock me up because the current political leaders disagree with my opinions.

It would be very hard to make sure the NSA doesn't have your info if thousands of other unscrupulous players have it and trade it.

One danger of this cancer having infected everything is that back in the day, if the NSA wanted to track people, they'd need to either exploit an existing feature that collected data (which there weren't many, and no guarantee people used them) or convince developers to include backdoors which had its own risks. Any large-scale spying required them to build & maintain infrastructure.

Nowadays, the cancer that is advertising provides a business reason as to why everything should be collecting data, so now the NSA effectively got to outsource their spying (without even any coercion!) and can just ask for the results.

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