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Comment by drevil-v2 | Hacker News Reader

Being the designated "tech" person for my extended family and friends circle, I don't think I could recommend this to any of them because of the privacy nightmare.

At least with Apple you have a single vendor who is vertically integrated and makes a huge song and dance about data privacy. Even if you discount their PR and marketing spin, IMHO you are still miles ahead of the likes of Microsoft + (pick one) HP, Asus, Lenovo and the rest of them.

There is no way I would trust any of them not to take advantage of the data gold mine.

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I was speaking to someone at the weekend about this. She said "but why would I need this"?

I suspect most people aren't putting AI into any purchasing decisions. Most people really actually don't give a shit about it. They just want things to work exactly how they did before without people moving stuff around because they just want to get stuff done.

As it has been said so many times, tech privacy aware people are the minority. It won't make any difference for my non-tech neighbor (in fact, he will probably be delighted if it helps him with something).

Not if you tell them beware, all this will be used against you in some way in the future.

The problem is that there's no concrete thing to point to as to why this would be used against them in the future

(I agree with the point, but it's just not trivial to make people aware of this)

Unless there is a specific, believable, near term risk people will just ignore it.

Most would submit genetic material to 23andme and similar organizations with no restriction on its use. Yes, if could theoretically backfire not just on them, but also on their kids. But unless they see it as a near-term likelihood they will not care enough. My 2c.

Well, that implies arrogance on their part. And there’s some blame from us too for not warning them enough I guess.

Doesn't the fact that lots of people use Facebook daily despite the scandals say something?

It's abundantly clear that most people don't care about how their data are used. Here "most" means people outside HN.

Lots of people I know completely stopped used Facebook. Some are still on IG though...

The whole point of NPU-enabled devices is to run models locally, so they your data never leaves your device. This is a huge privacy win.

Although the line can get fuzzy when they want to ship a feature that's too big to run locally. Android has run into that, some of the AI features run locally, some of them run on Googles servers, and some of them might run locally or on Googles servers depending on which device you happen to have.

They're trying to have it both ways and it's not clear to me as a consumer what is local and what is cloud. (As a developer, I can tell they're doing a few things locally like OCR and webcam background blur on the NPU, but they are not running ChatGPT on an a laptop anytime soon)

The whole point of enshittification is that companies don't need your data but they take it anyway.

The whole point is making the consumers pay the cost of running LLMs (both in hardware and power), not your privacy, they will still get your data to train better models.

Are they actually collecting new data to enable these features? Or is all of this data collected no matter what version of Windows you have installed?

It seems to me that what you just said is an argument against Windows in general, not against these new features.

It's probably easier for MS to just collect that no matter what so I doubt they'd stop themselves from doing it.

The way Microsoft keeps pushing ads into the start menu doesn't make me incredibly trusting here, no...

It's a pity that sometimes preferences and comfort are being overlooked in favor of corporate interests(

Privacy oriented users are already using Linux.

As a desktop operating sytem? Not the ones that value their time.

Yes, as a desktop operating system. Nothing else respects privacy really that would require less time. Or may be you have a suggestion?

macOS

Nah, why would you trust Apple - they see you as a product they want to lock-in.

How does macOS not respect your privacy? Be specific.

Apple is a heavily lock-in oriented company with ulterior motives and macOS is filled with DRM to boot. That's poorly compatible with the concept or privacy by definition.

Vague claims of ulterior motives (what motives? to what end?) and DRM (what drm?)

Well, if you don't get how DRM is incompatible with privacy, it's not going to be a productive discussion.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/17/ios-17-5-bug-wiped-devi...

It is only possible for photos to resurface because they were stored in iCloud for months or maybe years essentially in spite of user intention for those photos to be deleted.

> The Reddit user who reported the issue has deleted the original post, casting significant doubt on the veracity of the claim

would you say windows respects the users time?

that's just not my experience. linux is far more convenient for me.

I can think of exactly four non-IT people in my life who don't run Windows, all of them are family members and I personally talked them into Macs.

In my social bubble, no one runs [desktop] Linux. No one knows Linux. No one cares about Linux.

Above was about people who care about privacy though. It's not that surprising, but most people don't care about it to the degree that would make them use OSes that respect it. People who actually care tend to use Linux since they have an obvious reason.

>At least with Apple

> Even if you discount their PR and marketing spin,

It doesnt seem like you were able to do that.

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