iPhone = Privacy?
kerkour.com
kerkour.com
Much of this criticism seems misplaced or invalid. Apple tracks your IMEI? Well, sure, unless you choose otherwise, and they've given you a convenient place to turn off. Apple chipsets track your location down to the meter? Well, yes, that's a feature most people enjoy - and they've given you a convenient place to turn off, if you don't. Apple is using third party app Siri interactions to train Siri? How is this even a privacy issue... has any real world privacy problem ever occurred because of this? If you don't want Apple to hear your voice or process your Siri requests... don't use Siri? They've given you a convenient place to turn it off.
The only one I agree on is the image scanning for CSAM. The idea of a device I own acting as a state informer using AI to detect what it thinks is a crime is not my idea of a step forward.
My TV also doesn't have data as its main business model, however ... it still collects data on me.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/apples-advertising-business...
(I’m not a fan of ads, but don’t see how this is necessarily a privacy issue)
There's also the "app store health card" which the cynic in me would say is designed to scare people away from "competing" apps, because none of the Apple equivalents have a health card. Additionally there's no nuance - both iMessage and Twitter ask for location data - but only if you want to share your location. End result? People looking at Twitter in the App Store surmise "well, they must be tracking my location at all times!".
Apple's apps on the App Store most certainly do have health cards. Not sure what you've been looking at...?
It looks like the way it's implemented, access to photos comes through a Photos extension to iMessage (I think I recall these being called "iMessage apps"?), rather than it being inherent to the app.
And options for the microphone similarly seem to belong either to the extensions, or to the system—which handles microphone input as a substitute for typing.
It's possible you're right, and I'm missing something, but that's how it appears to me.
Google also claims they don't violate our privacy by hiding our data from third party advertisers. They still collect massive amounts of data ...
With Google, it was all true and still is...
Yes. People who don't quite understand how Siri works will divulge a lot of personal information. There's many stories from workers at these third parties about how much intimate detail they've heard when listening to these clips.
Now, that said, Google and Amazon do this too. It's truly a strike against all providers.
Assuming those internet stories are even true - can anyone show me actual harm occurring to anyone based on Apple's use of Siri training? I've heard some Alexa stories, but frankly, Apple seems to do a really good job of protecting that information, at least so far, at least as far as the public knows.
"Siri, order medicine X and deliver to address Y" is a simple example of how a simple command - whether valid or not - can expose someone's medical history, and while an ethical reviewer (probably 99%+ of reviewers) would do nothing with it, an unethical reviewer could.
FWIW, Siri isn't capable of anything resembling this. For fun, ask "Siri, how many days are left in this year?"
Not all commands are valid, but the invalid commands are reviewed as much (perhaps even more) than the valid ones. "Was it incorrectly invalid" is a question I, as a developer, would want to know.
If you as the question as "Hey Siri: how many days until the end of the year?", you get a valid response. I intuitively guessed that the word "until" was a trigger that would make Siri understand what I meant.
In other words - it's not that Siri isn't _capable_ of doing things like ordering medication, but that the syntax for doing so is still obscure and specific enough that most people aren't using it for purposes like that.
I've set up a number of shortcuts that I regularly use. For instance: "Tell my wife I made it" will send her a text message letting her know that I've arrived wherever I was going. "Tell _them_ I made it" will send the same message to my wife, daughter, and mom.
Until the NLP algorithms get better at inferring intent, a combination of user training and custom shortcuts will be needed to do things like this.
It requires there being some specific facility for Siri to place orders. It requires some mechanism for conveying payment. It requires being able to determine where to order from in any given case (because Apple, unlike Amazon, does not attempt to be the one-stop-shop for everything under the sun).
This really seems to be just perpetuating the popular, but dangerous, fallacy that "AI" is all basically the same thing, and if you keep feeding enough data to your NLP algorithms, at some point they'll become able to do things that affect the real world purely by some kind of handwaved "ability to connect to the network".
The assertion wasn't that there is a possibility that Siri could cause privacy harm. The claim was that it DOES cause privacy harm. So yes, a lack of reported harm is actually evidence here.
The likely reasoning behind this, although unspoken, was to (at some point in the future) enable E2EE for iCloud Photos. Currently, Apple doesn't do nearly any CSAM scanning on iCloud Photos[0], so the FBI et al. are pushing for them to change that - instead of licensing PhotoDNA, they tried to create something that would keep image data out of their hands while not further enabling CSAM distributors.
0: "According to NMEC, Apple submitted 205 reports in 2019 (a third my my reporting volume). Apple increased a little, to 265 in 2020, but then dropped in 2021 to only 160 reports. That's nearly a 22% decrease over two years!" https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/955-NC...
That's like saying cyanide tastes better than strychnine. It might be true, but I'd rather just not have either one.
Yes?! What's hard to understand about the difference between:
1) An application using AI to scan photographs to provide categorization benefits to the owner/operator/user
2) An application using AI to scan photographs to provide accusation and punishment to the owner/operator/user
...especially when feature #1 can be turned off, but feature #2 cannot be turned off?
iCloud mischaracterizing a baby picture as a "dog" might cause some dinner table chuckles, but it's never going to cause meaningful harm. iCloud mischaracterizing a baby picture as a child abuse image can VERY plausibly cause extremely severe harm.
As a matter of principle, my devices shouldn't be designed to act against my will as an active informant for the authorities against me. The point that they do is the point that I join the flannel and wooly beard set out in the mountains eschewing technology and living "off the grid".
The CSAM scan would not be enabled if you had iCloud Photos turned off. All it did was move the scan on-device, it still only ran if those photos were destined for the cloud.
One carries the risk of not finding a photo you're looking for.
The other carries the risk of a possibly life-ruining criminal investigations being opened against you.
This is a new surveillance vector that explicitly gives your phone the required functionality to report any flagged content on your device directly to the authorities, something that is clearly a slippery slope with questionable effectiveness at best. I'm not sure how you can compare it to strictly local face recognition AI.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/report-apple-is-expl...
There's also a convenient place to turn it off: CSAM scanning doesn't happen if you don't use iCloud photos/files syncing.
It's puzzling to me how this keeps getting repeated without any strong foundation. This story that others sell your data while Apple holds it secure is a narrative established by Apple that keeps coming up like a mantra.
The implication is that Google is gathering personal data to then then sell it to third parties.
But this is not their business model. They profile their customers via their behaviors and personal data, match them to a persona and then sell services to third parties to advertise to users fitting that persona.
I don't see how Apple is doing any less of customer profiling and persona generating than Google. They are both in the business of profiling their users and then monetizing them by offering services to internal/external customers who look for a certain audience.
The core of this is exactly the same between Apple and Google. Neither of them is selling the user-data directly, they both process it in order to package their users into a service they can sell to others.
The main thing that Apple does differently is, that they took stronger measures to ensure that the data THEY collect from their users can only be collected by THEM.
So Apple took action to protect their unique market position of selling ANY kind of goods to users of Apple products, and they claim that they are more honorable to hold and process all your data for financial gain just because (so far) they failed to compete in the advertising industry.
No, the implication is that Google collects as much of your personal data as possible, stores it forever, and monetizes it. You can tell because that's what I actually said. What you're responding to is a red herring - you brought up third parties, not me.
If I use the Apple Mail app with default settings from my iCloud account to e-mail ten lawn care services, I won't start seeing web ads for lawn care. If I use Gmail with default settings, I will.
> The main thing that Apple does differently is, that they took stronger measures to ensure that the data THEY collect from their users can only be collected by THEM.
No, the main thing that Apple does differently is make their money by selling hardware, software, and services directly to end users. This is in stark contrast to Google, whose typical business model offers free services that make the end users into the saleable product.
That's because Apple doesn't operate ad-services on scale at this point, particularly not on the web. The fact that they are scanning each and every email was made clear when they announced their CSAM scanner you also mentioned. I strongly doubt that Apple operates a crime-fighting division and that is the only purpose of scanning content. It's much more likely that they already analyze messages and content with other ML-models to refine the persona they created of a user.
So yes,they don't show you personalized ads on webpages, but without them operating in ads that's not an indicator of privacy. After failing to compete on Ads since 2010, their effort just started to ramp up in the last year.
> No, the main thing that Apple does differently is make their money by selling hardware, software, and services directly to end users.
Agreed, but Hardware is a segment that is close to saturation, and the majority of SW R&D resources are spent on the OS which is provided free of charge when purchasing the Hardware. Their growth-strategy is quite obviously based on services, with the strongest-growing of them being platforms of consumption (Appstore, Music, TV,...) and platforms of data-aggregation (Cloud, Pay, Card, CarPlay, Homekit,...).
Those consumption platforms serve content of third parties competing with each other for the user, and as the platform provider Apple offers those sellers paid services to reach the user.
I am fine to disagree, but in the growing world of services which are about to reach 25% of Apple's revenue soon, the Apple user who created the hardware revenue is the product being sold by Apple. To App-Developers, Music publishers, Movie Studios, Mobile carriers,...
Lost a lot of credibility here by including Apple employees, as that’s not a thing.
Honestly this just reads as a bunch if FUD for what appears to be no reason. There’s no new info, no new perspective, no attempt at fair explanation of why those things might actually be desirable for the customer…
Just a bunch of bad faith interpretations of how an iPhone works to try and scare or confuse the reader, and no discernible reason for why.
Would an apple employee be able to view icloud without the 2nd factor to pull down the decryption key?
In a well-run organisation this power would only be available to a small number of employees, would require a good reason and multiple people's authorisation, and would produce audit records. Is Apple such an organisation? Nobody knows.
This is more FUD; it doesn't need to be e2e encrypted to prevent an Apple employee (who isn't breaking a litany of laws and/or company policies) from viewing iCloud data.
I'm... just tired of baseless accusations like this, so casually thrown around. I've worked in this industry for 15 years, and when something like this is specifically possible, we say so because we have specific knowledge about how it would actually happen, not general "Yeah sure probably."
We have to do better, because if we don't, we sound like chicken littles and people just ignore us.
This wouldn't be an issue if iCloud was E2EE, but they probably save a chunk of money by only storing one copy of the "meme du jour" on their servers.
The idea of taking Apple seriously on privacy is a bit of bad joke when they block Firefox having ublock origin or implement at least the same for its Safari, and give users full option to install plugins for this browser (even if only from Apple-curated plugin store). It would be trivial for army of Apple devs to create similar blocking, yet they just curate what ads you see based on what they think is maximum acceptable amount & type for users, so no real privacy choice there.
I've heard even comments here on HN about how its actually a good thing to not have this freedom as 'power user'. Can't say I know how to respond to such schizophrenia so I'll pass on that, everybody can make up their own opinion.
Apple - fix this, and I will start taking your PR about security seriously. Till then, I simply can't since its obvious you talk more than actually do where it matters most, the wild unruly Internet of these days.
Apple saw how damaging the iCloud privacy scandal and Cambridge Analytica were. They responded by fully hitching Apple’s brand to the privacy train.
If Apple were to be caught intentionally violating user privacy now, the damage to the brand would be immense.
Apple makes their money primarily by selling cool stuff to people. If they tarnish their brand by violating people’s privacy like Google or Meta, end users have far less incentive to buy Apple’s products.
People I know in category above, and rest as well buy Apple since its premium product, there is a lot of ads on it everywhere, its a lot in media ie Hollywood product placement, they like the design, they like photos it makes, and the price you have to pay makes you stand out as non-cheapskate in same vein cool fresh haircut or expensive clothing/jewelry does. Privacy isn't in top 10, ever.
Scandals? What scandals? In current world they come and go, people have little attention span with covid, wars, environmental crises and so on. That goes for Android too, people en masse simply don't care about phone privacy. Makes me a bit sad but it is what it is.
[0] https://www.barrons.com/articles/apples-advertising-business...
There are MANY stories about their push into ads to augment their other newer services money streams. That's just one.
I just started reading and there is already a sentence I don't believe very much, even less as a generalization. Does anyone here have a basis that could explain this bold statement ?
I doubt there is any proof that some kind of system activity is still taking place while in airplane mode, but that might be irrelevant.
For some people, depending on their threat model and personal preference, what's important is that it's impossible to prove beyond any doubt that this is _not_ the case.
It's just wrong. On iPhones, Airplane Mode turns off all radios except Bluetooth.
To me, this seems really dishonest.
You can also easily turn off "Maps" tracking or limit it the same way if you choose.
I got to admit that I don't see the meat in this burger, so to speak.
Thats just plain wrong. Poorly researched article.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of the iPhone, aside from Apple making most of their money selling real products not your data, is that every concern he had was accompanied by a setting to disable it
This is the reason why I have a certain degree of confidence in Apple’s privacy aspirations. Apple makes their money primarily by selling cool stuff to end users. Their business model heavily disincentives mass tracking.
Google and Meta couldn’t ever be as privacy-friendly as Apple, due to their business models.
Airplane mode leaves the cellular radio on? Not according to signal tests!
To mitigate telco surveillance, switch your number to VOIP and use burner SIM's or pretty good phone privacy.
(Human review with explanation and consultation with the doctor / police should have led to "ok, false positive this time".)
Android smartphones are indeed worse, but it's not the only alternative. Consider GNU/Linux phones if you care about privacy and want to support it: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone.
There are also things like /e/OS (Edit: and GrapheneOS), but they are installed on Android phones and must obey their planned obsolescence due to the proprietary drivers (tied to an old Linux kernel).
How many years will a phone running these be usable on average?
[1] - https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-support
[2] - https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
[3] - https://e.foundation/
Oh no! The manufacturer of my phone knows the unique identifier they created and assigned to my phone? Whatever shall I do?
By not using a phone, because your carrier knows this information too and also sells this data (Apple does not).
It's trivial to turn off Location Services on an iPhone, in which case your location data isn't sent to Apple. You can also control this on an application-by-application basis if you wish. However, this doesn't stop your carrier from capturing and sharing your location data.
Hopefully this clears it up for you.
> By not using a phone, because your carrier knows this information too and also sells this data (Apple does not).
What my carrier is doing has nothing to do with the problem at hand, which is Apple collecting unnecessary data on me. Not using a phone is not a (reasonable) solution to Apple invading my privacy. I can use another phone instead, which doesn't do that.
> It's trivial to turn off Location Services on an iPhone
Let me remind you that this thread started with "iOS sends a lot of data about your phone to Apple, such as your phone number, your unique device identifier...". How can I prevent Apple from collecting my phone number? You didn't reply to that, you shifted goals to location tracking of my carrier.
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