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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

For privacy-conscious people, the authors certainly picked an outlet with plenty of cookies and trackers - this is what the popup shows me when I pick "customise":

    17 necessary cookies
    7 functional 
    34 statistics
    49 marketing
    10 unclassified

This kind of thing makes the article seem... ridiculous, really. Their site is much worse at privacy than Apple.

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The authors appear to be associated the university which hosts the site. I doubt they are responsible for the engineering decisions behind the site, or that they "picked the outlet" per se. Authors tend not to have carte blanche control over the platforms on which they publish.

I don't know why you would judge the content of the article based on that, rather than its own merits, particularly given that the subject of the article isn't the security of web pages or cookies. If anything, what the article does discuss has far more egregious security implications than website cookies.

The article also has a number of incorrect assumptions regarding how Siri works and what kind of data Apple collects. They do not mention Apple's differential privacy approach, for instance, nor do they seem aware of many iOS improvements in that regard over the past few years. So I don't really consider it a thoroughly researched piece...

This is the criticism you should have posted originally, instead of considering the article ridiculous because it was hosted on a site that used cookies.

All sites use cookies. Not all of them use an entire bakery's worth.

And yet that isn't at all relevant to the content of the article, and pointing it out isn't a valid criticism of the article.

At least they have a "Reject all" button, easy to access (it should be the norm). Not some dodgy dark pattern that takes a good minute to find.

I think that's just GDPR?

> The requirement to offer a 'Reject All' button next to an 'Accept All' button follows indirectly from the consent requirements in the GDPR; consent must be as easy to revoke as it is to give.

https://www.dataguidance.com/opinion/eu-cookie-banners-and-u...

I feel like you might want to consider the scale of data collection involved here purely from the perspective of Apple being one of the largest companies in the world, and this being a medium-sized university in Finland.

Heh, don't like some aspect of society, kiddo? Well you have no right to criticize it - you're IN a society!

Not their fault to be fair. Blame management of Aalto University.

Who is "management?" The author of the article is listed as the university's communications manager so they wouldn't be totally without a voice in these decisions.

It can get quite high in the chain. This is a financial decision - extract value (money) with the cost of other values (principles) and users' privacy.

If you're using cookie-count to determine the degree of invasiveness, you're missing the fact that Apple has exclusive root access to your phone.

Come on, no one is running all their private data through the website. But I do agree that the web should not be browsed without ublock as is at the moment - there's something fundamentally wrong with the current approach

Sorry, but that's a fallacy:

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

That article explains what it is, but doesn't explain why it is wrong.

If you're arguing for more privacy but you're participating in removing privacy, why isn't that hypocritical and makes the argument for privacy weaker from that person?

I agree that it's off-topic to the discussion as a whole, for this particular submission, as it doesn't argue against the content of the article but rather talks about how the content is hosted.

It does not make the argument weaker, that's the point. To think otherwise is a fallacy.

If someone writes that it is healthier to stop smoking, but then someone finds out that the author is a heavy smoker, does that make smoking somehow ok?

The point is that there are so many commentators who assert that Apple is great on privacy issues, so that many people (including me) automatically believed that buying (expensive) Apple products will automatically lead to improved privacy vs other vendors. This post is calling that BS. Attacking the article/website for have cookies, is a distraction from the actual point.

And anyway if you want to see tracking cookies with a browse you only have to use Option + ⌘ + J (on macOS), or Shift + CTRL + J (on Windows/Linux). Easy. It is much more difficult to see if you are being tracked and what data is being tracked and how it is being used on your mac or iphone.

I am as concerned about security as I am about privacy, and Apple has the best track record for long-lived devices that are still receiving security updates.

As for privacy I don't know any major vendor that is privacy-focused. Not only is it a hard technical problem to solve, it's also leaving money on the table. I don't see things changing any time soon.

> Apple products will automatically lead to improved privacy vs other vendors. This post is calling that BS.

Where does it do that? It explicitly doesn’t compare Apple’s products with other products:

“Lindqvist can’t comment directly on how Google's Android works in similar respects, as no one has yet done a similar mapping of its apps.”

Also, IMO the post is flame-bait in saying “Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected”. AFAICT, the paper (https://acris.aalto.fi/ws/portalfiles/portal/141787684/Priva...) is not about Apple breaking privacy at all; it solely is about the difficulty of the UI for various privacy settings and of user understanding of what settings do.

They don’t claim, for example, that Apple makes these settings so convoluted to confuse or wear down users so that they close down less stuff (they may or may not, but the paper doesn’t discuss it)

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