Hacker News Reader

Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

But this is not true. that's the thing.

Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time. ios gives you zero control (all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it)

Apple uses your data. you should be able to say no.

And as for your data, they do other things too, a different way. Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to icloud.

I've seem privacy minded parents say no, but then they get their kid an iphone and all of their stuff goes to icloud.

I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data icloud.

View on HN

> Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time.

The platform is heavily internet-integrated, and I would expect it to periodically hit Apple servers. There are a lot of people claiming to be security researchers reporting what Little Snitch told them. There are drastically fewer who would introspect packets and look for any gathered telemetry.

I really haven't seen evidence Apple is abusing their position here.

> Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to iCloud.

You need to enable iCloud. You are prompted.

Also, a new device should have next to nothing to upload to iCloud, as its hard disk is still in the factory configuration.

> I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data iCloud

They have desktop backup. Maybe they should allow third party backup Apps on iPhone, although I suspect data would be encrypted and blinded to prevent abuses by third parties, and recovery would be challenging because today recovery is only possible on a known-state filesystem. The recovery aspect is what really has limited it to the handful of approaches implemented directly by Apple.

A key difference is that Apple isn’t then selling the info it has on you to advertisers.

I don’t think any large tech company is morally good, but I trust Apple the most out of the big ones to not do anything nefarious with my info.

They absolutely are. And they give it to governments upon request.

Their privacy stories are marketing first.

They are selling data to advertisers? I would like to know more about that.

Google isn't. They are the advertising engine and sell to advertisers for reach, just like Facebook does.

I trust Apple about as far as I can throw them too. They are inherently anti-consumer rights everywhere in their ecosystem. The "Privacy" angle is just PR.

I would say it is PR as much as it is a strategic differentiation. Their business model is too sell products and services directly to consumers. This is different from Microsoft who is selling to businesses who need data protection, but actually want to be able to monitor their employees and Google who wants to leverage your data / behavior to allow advertisers to effectively target you with ads.

None of the big companies expressly sell your information. Not because they are altruistic, but because it is an asset that they want to protect so they can rent to the next person.

Yo Apple is an ad company as well now. They do both.

They all do a little bit of everything. Google sells devices too, but they are not predominantly a physical device company.

At 3 trillion Dollars of market cap they are a capitalistic hellscape and do everything in their power to benefit their own interests, which are not yours.

It’s amazing how many here don’t understand that.

There are several very nuanced comments much farther up this chain who clearly do understand that, and lay out their informed reasoning for why they have chosen to use Apple devices for themselves. It’s amazing how many here seem to have ignored them.

I don't think they sell it like Google or Samsung. For example Apple does not have a location intelligence team dedicated to driving revenue for store brands or targeting users that go there using precise geo location data.

Google and Samsung do.

Give me a source that they are selling your data, not targeted ads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40642672

I _trust_ Google to attempt to do so, and fail sadly along the way…

They went from “Don’t be evil” to a cartoonish “Doctor Evil” character in a decade.

> And they give it to governments upon request.

So in other words, "companies operating within a nation are expected to abide by the laws of that nation"?

Apple structures their systems to limit the data they can turn over by request, and documents what data they do turn over. What else do you believe they should be doing?

Actually under US rule of law you don’t just turn over things upon request.

Much like every other tech company you test the request.

Apple never does.

> Apple never does.

Citation needed?

None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers. They allow advertisers to target people based on the data, but the data itself is never sold. And it would be dumb to sell it because selling targeted ads is a lot more valuable than selling data.

Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.

> None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers.

First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.

I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.

On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.

I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.

> we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels

So you got aggregated analytics instead of data about individual users.

Meanwhile other companies are selling your name, phone number, address history, people you are affiliated with, detailed location history, etc.

Which one would you say is "selling user data"?

Anyone who disagrees with you about this should buy a Mac and try not enabling iCloud. There's constant nags and as far as I could find, no way to turn them off.

1) Have you tried installing Linux? ;-)

2) I have booted macOS VMs without iCloud. I'm not sure of the nags though. I believe signing out of iCloud will prevent iCloud from contacting Apple.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104958

1) yes:)

2) that is entirely NOT true. You should install little snitch and see what happens even if you NEVER sign into icloud. note that the phone home contact is not immediate, it happens in the background at random intervals from random applications.

just some random services blocked by little snitch on a mac:

accountsd, adprivacyd, airportd, AMPLibraryAgent, appstoreagent, apsd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, cloudd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service, commerce, configd, familycircled, mapspushd, nsurlsessiond, ocspd, rapportd, remindd, Safari, sntp, softwareupdated, Spotlight, sutdentd, syspolicyd, touristd, transparencyd, trustd, X11.bin

(never signed into an apple id)

Tell me more about how dastardly it is that Safari communicates with Apple servers. Type it from your browser that doesn’t communicate directly with its developers.

Judging from a lot of these comments, most of the folks here are reading/commenting via telnet.

I’ve never used iCloud since it came out. I can’t think of a single nag. Where do you see it on your iPhone or Mac?

I have an iPad (not iPhone or Mac). If you don't set up Icloud, there's always an annoying bright red circle in settings that tells you to "finish setting up your iPad".

Doesn't have to be bright red, or even there at all.

Last time I had that on a laptop I was going to wipe soon afterward and didn’t want to fully set up, I clicked the “finish setting up” link and canceled out. Voila, red circle gone.

Gone until a few days or a week later, when it comes back.

Yes, that’s the only one I’ve seen. But it’s not much of a nag.

There's several of them. The most annoying for me was getting intermittent notifications to sign in to iCloud.

There's also this one: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250727947

I eventually just gave in to stop the nags.

> all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it

Technically you can by turning off wi-fi and disabling cellular data, bluetooth, location services, etc. for the app.

To your point though, wi-fi data should also be a per-app setting, and it is an annoying omission. macOS has outgoing firewalls, but iOS does not (though you could perhaps fake it with a VPN.)

> Apple is very intrusive

> Apple uses your data.

> they do other things too, a different way

What specifically do you mean? Their frankly quite paranoid security and privacy white papers are pretty comprehensive and I don’t think they could afford to lie in those.

> Apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data iCloud

Advanced Data Protection[0] applies e2ee for basically everything, with the exception email, and doesn’t degrade the seamless multi-device experience at all. For most people this is the best privacy option by a long shot, and no other major platform can provide anything close.

They’ve hampered product experience for a long time because of their allergy against modelling their customers on the cloud. The advent of AI seems to have caught them a bit off guard but the integrated ecosystem and focus on on-device processing looks like it may pay off, and Siri won’t feel 5 years behind Google Assistant or Alexa.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102651

> What specifically do you mean? Their frankly quite paranoid security and privacy white papers are pretty comprehensive and I don’t think they could afford to lie in those.

A couple of years ago Apple was busted when it was discovered that most Apple first-party apps weren't getting picked up by packet sniffer or firewalls on macOS.

Apple tried deflecting for a while before finally offering up the flimsy claim that it "was necessary to make updates easier". Which isn't a really good explanation when you're wondering why TextEdit.app needs a kernel network extension.

What actually happened was Apple removed support for kernel extensions that these firewall apps used.

The user-mode replacement APIs allowed by sandboxed apps had a whitelist for Apple's apps, so you couldn't install some App Store firewall app that would then disable the App Store and screw everything up.

After the outrage, in a point release a few months later, they silently emptied out the whitelist, resolving the issue.

They never issued any kind of statement.

So their "fix", as described here, removed protection from "having the App Store disabled and everything screwed up"?

That makes no sense.

Even if it did, the app the would need protection is the App Store, not every single Apple app. In many cases, the fix for the worst case scenario would be "remove firewall app".

Also, given that TextEdit was not an AppStore app, for but one example, but a base image app.

> They never issued any kind of statement.

Shocking. I've had at least two MBPs affected by different issues that were later subject to recall, but no statement there. radar.apple.com may well be read by someone, but is largely considered a black hole.

The lack of an iOS setting to deny specific apps network access is absurd. It doesn't feel like much of a privacy-focused platform when every day in my network logs I see hundreds of attempted connections from 'offline' iOS apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com