Apple has never been privacy-first in practice. They give you the illusion of privacy but in reality it's a closed-source system and you are forced to trust Apple with your data.
They also make it a LOT harder than Android to execute your own MITM proxies to inspect what exact data is being sent about you by all of your apps including the OS itself.
The reality is, there's too much to verify, and not enough interest for the "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" argument.
We are, all of us, forced to trust, forced to go without the genuine capacity to verify. It's not great, and the best we can do is look for incentives and try to keep those aligned.
If you want to, for example, compile a GPS-free version of Android that appears like it has GPS but in reality just sends fake coordinates to keep apps happy thinking they got actual permissions, it's fairly straightforward to make this edit, and you own the hardware so it's within your rights to do this.
Open-source is only part of it; in terms of privacy, being able to see what all is being sent in/out of my device is is arguably more important than open source. Closed source would be fine if they allowed me to easily inject my own root certificate for this purpose. If they aren't willing to do that, including a 1-click replacement of the certificates in various third-party, certificate-pinning apps that are themselves potential privacy risks, it's a fairly easy modification to any open source system.
A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets sent out of hardware that I own should be my right.
I agree; unfortunately it feels as if this ship has not only sailed, but the metaphor would have to be expanded to involve the port at well.
Is it even possible, these days, to have a functioning experience with no surprise network requests? I've tried to limit mine via an extensive hosts file list, but that did break stuff even a decade ago, and the latest version of MacOS doesn't seem to fully respect the hosts file (weirdly it partially respects it?)
> A screen on my wall that flashes every JSON that gets sent out of hardware that I own should be my right.
I remember reading a tale about someone, I think it was a court case or an audit, who wanted every IP packet to be printed out on paper. Only backed down when the volume was given in articulated lorries per hour.
I sympathise, but you're reminding me of that.
Apple is absolutism. Even the so called "enlightened" absolutism is still bad compared to average democracy.
I was one of many who reported a bug in Ubuntu that went un-fixed for years, where the response smelled of nation-state influence: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1359836
And Log4Shell took about 8 years to notice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4Shell
Thanks for making my point for me.
I'm not saying closed source is a silver bullet.
I'm saying OSS also isn't a silver bullet, it doesn't find everything because there's not enough interest in doing this work.
The Log4j example alone, given it took 8 years, is enough to demonstrate that.
Everything is an illusion of trust, nothing is perfect; all we can do is try to align the interests of those working on projects with the interests of society — which is so hard that it's an entire field of study called "politics".
I would think ease of MITM and privacy are opposing concerns
If Apple enabled RCS in messages back then, but the recipient was not using RCS, then Google now has the decrypted text message, even when RCS advertises itself as E2EE. With iMessage, at least I know all of my messages are E2EE when I see a blue bubble.
Even now, RCS is available on Android if using Google Messages. Yes, it's pre-installed on all phones, but OEMs aren't required to use it as the default. It opens up more privacy concerns because now I don't know if my messages are secure. At least with the green bubbles, I can assume that anything I send is not encrypted. With RCS, I can't be certain unless I verify the messaging app the recipient is using and hope they don't replace it with something else that doesn't support RCS.
Having iMessage available to everyone regardless of their mobile OS.
Their words or your words?
By what? It's impossible for a process to know for sure if the system is rooted or not. A rooted system can present itself to a process to look like a non-rooted system if it's engineered well enough.
I'd bet that most of these apps probably just check if "su" returns a shell, in which case perhaps all that's needed is to modify the "su" executable to require "su --magic-phrase foobar" before it drops into a root shell, and returns "bash: su: not found" or whatever if called with no arguments.
That was true 20 years ago, but most smartphones these days have cryptograhically-verified boot chains and remote attestation of how the boot went.