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Comment by jspann | Hacker News Reader

I remain skeptical until I see it in action. On the one hand, Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device. On the other, there was too much ambiguity around this announcement. What is the threshold for running something in the cloud? How is your personal model used across devices - does that mean it briefly moves to the cloud? How does its usage change across guest modes? Even the phrase "OpenAI won’t store requests" feels intentionally opaque.

I was personally holding out for a federated learning approach where multiple Apple devices could be used to process a request but I guess the Occam's razor prevails. I'll wait and see.

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> Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device.

Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong". I don't expect an amazing AI assistant out of them, I expect something that sometimes does what the user meant.

> Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong".

And yet this was never said.

Closest was this:

> Just don't hold it that way.

Or maybe this:

> If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

It's merely the instance that gave the name to the phenomena, not the only time it happened.

What phenomena?

When Apple published a webpage about how other phones also got reduced reception when you held them in a particular way, but then basically immediately pulled it. And then a while later they offered a free bumper case to mitigate the whole issue.

None of that suggests any malice. We don’t know what happened internally, other than the arial designer was eventually let go. That engineer could have been pushing the “every phone has the problem” narrative and brushing it off. At some point the pressure from customer feedback could have meant they were overruled and ordered to retest, or test under the specific conditions.

The fact that Apple changed their stance from “here’s a workaround” to “here’s a free bumper” is a sign they reacted to something, and that could have been anything from the conclusion of internal testing to a PR job to keep customers happy.

If they had said there was no design flaw from the start and stuck with that the whole way then I’d understand people’s reaction, but all I see is a company that said “don’t hold it that way” as a workaround then eventually issued free bumpers, thus confirming the issue. That doesn’t suggest they were blaming the user for doing something wrong. The sentiment just wasn’t there.

Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.

Everyone makes fun of Sammy batteries exploding, but forget antennagate, bendgate, software gimping of battery life, butterfly keyboards, touch disease, yellow screens (which I believe were when Apple had to split supply Samsung/LG), exploding Macbook batteries (not enough to cause a fuss tho). Etc.

Other companies can of course be ne'er-do-wells, but people actively defend Apple for the company's missteps.

I rarely see anyone defending Apple, but I do see people constantly applying logic to them specifically that they don’t seem to apply to other companies. Take this:

> Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.

You can’t immediately address any issue. You need time to investigate issues. You might not even start investigating until you hit some sort of threshold or you’ll be chasing your tail in every bit of customer feedback. It takes time to narrow down anything to a bad component, bad batch, software bug or whatever it is.

As for weighing whether the issue is worth addressing at all - this is literally every company. If you did a recall of every bit of hardware at the slightest whiff of an issue you’d go bankrupt very quickly. There are always thresholds.

I wish we would just criticise apple in the same way we do with other companies. There is no need to invent things like “you’re holding it wrong” or intentionally misunderstanding batterygate into “they slowed down phones to sell you a new one”. They already do other crappy things, inventing fake ones isn’t necessary.

> What is the threshold for running something in the cloud?

To be fair, this was just the keynote -- details will be revealed in the sessions.

> has a good track record with privacy

They repeated this so many times they've made it true.

Do you have proof otherwise? Compared to the competition, who openly use everything about you to build a profile.

The iPhone will let you install an app only if you tell Apple about it. It will let you get your location only if you also give that location to Apple. The only way to get true privacy is to give users control, which even Google-flavored Android builds provide more of than iOS.

After so many years, so many people still believe in this user control paradigm.

Giving users control works for the slim percentage of power users. Most users will end up obliterated by scammers and other unsavory characters.

Perhaps there is a way to give control to today's users (that includes my non-technical mother) and still secure them against the myriad of online threats. If anyone knows of a paper or publication that addresses this, I'd love to read it.

If you want privacy, that's the only way to get it. As Apple has demonstrated, giving the platform owner control means eroding your privacy with no recourse and still getting obliterated by scammers.

> The iPhone will let you install an app only if you tell Apple about it

That’s not 100% true, and where it is, there is a good reason, and pretty much every other store does it (being able to revoke malware)

It's 100% true. On Android, you don't have to use a store, and you don't have to tell anybody anything if you don't use a store.

I get the sense there's still a lot of work to be done over the next few months, and we may see some feature slippage. The betas will be where we see their words in action, and I'll be staying far away from the betas, which will be a little painful. I think ambiguity works in their favor right now. It's better to underpromise and overdeliver, instead of vice versa.

They need to provide a mechanism to view the data being uploaded by you

Same they say privacy so many times i got Facebook PTSD.

I mean theres a difference between these companies on their privacy stance historical and current.

> Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device.

I mean they have great PR, but in terms of privacy, they extract more information from you than google does.

Can you explain what you mean with "extract more information from you than google" here?

Not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious what sources or info you're using to make that claim.

on iOS Apple record:

o who you message, when you message.

o Your locations (find my devices)

o your voice (siri)

o the location of your items (airtags)

o what you look at (App telemetry)

o What websites you visit (Safari telemetry)

o what you buy (Apple Pay)

o Who your with (location services, again)

o your facial biometrics (apple photos tags people with similar faces, something FAcebook got fined for)

o Who emails you, who you email

With these changes, you'll need to allow apple to process the contents of the messages that you send and receive. If you read their secuirity blog it has a lot of noise about E2E security, then admit that its not practical for things other than backups and messaging.

they then say they will strive to make userdata ephemeral in the apple private cloud.

I'm not saying that they will abuse it, I'm just saying that we should give apple the same level of scrutiny that we give people like Facebook.

Infact, personally I think we should use Facebook as the shitty stick to test data use for everyone.

What do you mean by the “record”? It seems like you think this means Apple somehow has access and stores all that information in their cloud and we just have to hope/trust that they don’t decide they want to poke around in it?

You should look more into their security architecture if you’re curious about stuff like this. The way Secure Enclave, E2EE (including the Advanced Data Protection feature for all iCloud data), etc. The reality is that they use a huge range of privacy enhancing approaches to minimize what data has to leave your device and how it can be used. For example the biometrics you mention are never outside the Secure Enclave in the chip on your phone and nobody except you can access them unless they have your passcode. Things like running facial recognition on your photos library is handled locally on your device with no information going up to the cloud. FindMy is also architected in a fully E2E encrypted way.

You can browse their hundreds of pages of security and privacy documentation via the table of contents here to look up any specific service or functionality you want to know more about: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web

by record, I mean precisely that. Apple stores this data. As the Key bearer it has significant control.

Moreover, because apple has great PR, you don't hear about privacy breeches. Everyone seems to forget they made a super cheap and for a long time undetectable stalking service. Despite the warnings. (AirTag)

Had that been Facebook or Google, it would have been the end of the feature. They have improved the unauthorised tracking flow, but its really quite unreliable with ios, and really bad in android still.

> You should look more into their security architecture if you’re curious about stuff like this.

I have, and its a brilliant manifesto. I especially love the documentation on PCC.

but, its crammed full of implied actions that aren't the case For example: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756

> If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data – including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more – is protected using end-to-end encryption.

Ok good, so its not much different to normal right?

> When you turn on Advanced Data Protection, access to your iCloud data on the web at iCloud.com is disabled

Which leads me to this:

> It seems like you think this means Apple somehow has access and stores all that information in their cloud and we just have to hope/trust that they don’t decide they want to poke around in it?

You're damn right I do. Its the same with Google, and Facebook. We have no real way of verifying that trust. People trust Apple, because they are great at PR. But are they actually good at privacy? We have no real way of finding out, because they also have really reactive lawyers.

and thats my point, we are basically here: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/11gxpcu/our_little_... but with apple.

Do you have a source for this?

Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.

What does Apple have that's even close?

I think what he's getting at is that Apple does collect a lot of very similar data about it's users. Apple Maps still collects data about where you've driven - the difference is that they don't turn around and sell that data like Google loves to do.

I believe (but could be wrong) they also treat that data in a way that prevents it from being accessed by anyone besides the user (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

Apple is also an ad company,

they generate between $5-10B on ads alone a year now and more importantly that is one their fastest growing revenue segment .

Add the context of declining revenue from iPhone sales. That revenue and its potential will have enormous influence on decision making .

The thesis that Apple doesn’t have ads business so there is no use to collect the data is dead for 5years now

Talking about billions is disingenuous, you should be talking about percentages of revenue. Ten billion _sounds_ like a lot but really isn't.

For Google, over 80% of their revenue comes from ads.

Apple's revenue is around 380 billion, 5-10 billion in ads is in the "other" category if you draw a pie chart of it... They make 30 billion just selling iPads - their worst selling product.

Apple can lose the ad category completely and they won't even notice it. If Google's ads go away because of privacy protections, the company will die.

Talking absolutes is not accurate either. Not all revenue is equal.

There is reason why NVDIA, TSLA or stocks with growth[1] potential gets the P/E multiple that their peers do not or an blue chip traditional company can only dream of. The core of Apple revenue the biggest % chunk of iPhone sales is stagnant at best falling at worst. Services is their fastest growing revenue segment and already is ~$100 B of the $380B. Ads is a key component of that, 5 years back Ads was less < $1B, that is the important part.

Also margins matter, even at Apple where there is enormous margin for hardware, gross margins for services is going to be higher, that is simple economics of any software service cost of extra user or item is marginal. The $100B is worth lot more than equivalent $100B in iPhone, iPad sales where significant chunk will go to vendors.

Executives are compensated on stock performance, stock valuation depends on expected future growth a lot. Apple's own attempts and the billions invested to get into Auto, Healthcare, or Virtual Reality are a testament to that need to find new streams of revenue.

It would be naive to assume a fast growing business unit does not get outsized influence, any middle manager in a conglomerate would know how true this is.

A Disney theme park executive doing even 5x revenue as say the Disney+ one will not get the same influence, budgets,resources or respect or career paths.

[1] Expected Growth, doesn't have to be real,when it does not materialize then market will correct as is happening to an extent with TSLA.

> Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.

Thats not what I was saying. I was saying that Apple extract more information than google does. I was not saying that Apple process it to make a persona out of you. Thats not the issue here. Apple is saying that they are a "Privacy first" company. To be that, you need to not be extracting data in the first place.

Yes, they make lots of noise about how they do lots of things on device. Thats great and to be encouraged. But Apple are still extracting your friend list, precise location, financial records, various biometrics, browsing and app history. ANd for sure, they need some of that data to provide services.

But whats the data life cycle? are they deleting it on time? who has access to it, what about when a new product wants to use it? how do they stop internal bad actors?

All I want you to do is imagine that Facebook has made iOS, and the iphone, and is now rolling out these features. They are saying the same things as Apple, do you trust them?

Do you believe what they say?

I don't want Apple to fail, I just want people to think critically about a very very large for profit company. Apple is not our friend, and we shouldn't be treating them like they are.

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