iPhone is not as private as you might think | Hacker News Reader

iPhone is not as private as you might think

proton.me

39 pointsjethronethro20 comments

neither is proton mail

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...

“Proton must comply with Swiss law. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended and we’re required by Swiss law to answer requests from Swiss authorities,” he wrote.

See the problem with privacy services like proton mail, signal and tor is that their customers very often do have something to hide, and so they become a target both legally and technically. You better believe the intelligence services are so deep in those services they're having picnic on the lawn. Using them is kind of like camouflaging your body with bright neon orange fluorescent paint to hide in a crowd

Now we just need two deep insiders to tell us whether being a target is better than dragnet surveillance where they don't even need a warrant to find everyone above a certain score of "interesting"

In fact, the case you shared shows that Proton Mail is exactly as private as advertised. The emails of the user stored on our servers could not have been shared because we don't have a access to them (due to zero-access encryption: https://proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption). Of course, as any other legally operating company, we need to comply to local legislation, and the very little data we need to have (more in our Privacy Policy: https://proton.me/legal/privacy) will be shared if we're presented with a court order we have no legal grounds to contest. Proton doesn't provide privacy by refusing to cooperate with the law enforcement, but by not having access to the data. We also don't have any backdoors for intelligence services, as you seem to imply.

On the other hand, as described in the blog above, Apple does have access to your data, and uses some of it to serve targeted ads: https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy.

Such blogposts imho are great ways to inform in simple language, promote your own offerings and improve your branding.

I've been a satisfied customer of proton for some time now.

Me too. The article had a good suggestion for Apple users: turn in Advance Data Protection. The article didn’t mention it, but I feel good about keeping Lockdown Mode activated.

"In December 2023, a US senator revealed that Apple had received sealed court orders that forced it to secretly share push notification data with law enforcement agencies in the US and foreign countries."

...

"Apple did not take even minimum precautions to protect users’ privacy, such as requiring a court order before disclosing push notifications."

I'm confused, did they or did they not disclose push notifications without a court order? It's unclear from the article if they simply updated the privacy policy to reflect their internal process or not.

It doesn't matter what Apple's policy is. They are required to comply with US law.

Just like Proton would be required to comply with Swiss law including handing over data which is unencrypted e.g. IP addresses, recipient, sender, subject line etc.

And it's not like the Swiss government is that much better than the US:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/swiss-government-accus....

100% agree, but I'm curious if they were doing the bare minimum required to comply with the law or proactively handing out data they didn't have to yet.

In the past I worked closely with Erik Neuenschwander, who spearheads user privacy at Apple, and I'd be very surprised to hear they didn't fight these requests.

The Swiss government is much less committed to privacy than most are aware of:

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

In the US, subpoena's without a judge's signature have a lot of room to be challenge and if Apple isn't challenging, just handing over when a cop comes asking, that's their right to avoid the work of defending users but it's also reasonable for users to know that Apple won't take steps to defend them when it can because Apple doesn't want the difficulty. This is true for pharmacies in the US too which all hand over your prescriptions to cops without a court-signed warrant, just a procedural request from the pig.

> Apple’s marketing team has built a powerful association between the iPhone and privacy. The company’s ad campaigns claim that “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” And, “Privacy. That’s iPhone.”

The same thing goes for Proton as their entire business and marketing is based on selling privacy and fearmongering. Even this blog post is about selling services and they always write about it when Apple is getting hit by something and talked about. ;-)

I’m having a hard time parsing the implication here, are you saying that proton is guilty of violating user privacy despite their marketing claims?

I'm just commenting on using situation to boost their sales, engagement, and that specific quote. Nothing wrong in this. But they had a fair share of controversies around them too. As each one of those "privacy first" companies, and don't get me wrong it's not a bad thing.

There was some drama a few years ago where Proton provided IP addresses of some activist to authorities, so yeah, they will do so just as much as Apple will.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...

Apple is definitely collecting user data for advertising purposes, which to my knowledge is not something proton would be doing.

I wouldn’t agree that it’s “just as much as Apple” here.

Right. the "just as much" as was with regards to "they will comply with law enforcement requests" rather than the quantity/type of information part...

Given that the blog post mentions apple’s ad business, I had no reason to believe that “just as much” somehow meant less than what was the subject of the discussion.

Sure, feedback is noted. Hopefully a bit more clear now after my response. :)

In fact, this case shows that Proton Mail is exactly as private as advertised. The emails of the user stored on our servers could not have been shared because we don't have a access to them (due to zero-access encryption: https://proton.me/blog/zero-access-encryption). Of course, as any other legally operating company, we need to comply to local legislation, and the very little data we need to have (more in our Privacy Policy: https://proton.me/legal/privacy) will be shared if we're presented with a court order we have no legal grounds to contest. Proton doesn't provide privacy by refusing to cooperate with the law enforcement, but by not having access to the data.

On the other hand, as described in the blog above, Apple does have access to your data, and uses some of it to serve targeted ads: https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy.

Another good reason to not use a smartphone.

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