Guess what? Most people who end up buying this product won't care about any of these.
(P.S. Apple is much worse than you think. Look up Apple's first party tracking.)
(P.S. Apple is much worse than you think. Look up Apple's first party tracking.)
Apple is a lot worse then most of their users believe - but even at their worst, they're leagues more privacy focused and less invasive then Google, Facebook and Microsoft are.
But they're still getting worse every year, and the time when they were actually torchbearers for privacy have slowly faded over the years as MBAs have strengthened their hold on the company and Steve Jobs influence waned.
Going back to Apple, their stance on privacy is more geared towards their internal consumption (abuse?) than towards privacy violation-as-a-service for sale. That's not great but I'll take anything I can get.
I know what I'm sharing with Apple is up for grabs by them to use "against" me. And I know the same is true for Google of Facebook, so no real difference here. The problem is the next level, where what I share with someone else is up for grabs by Google or Facebook, or the other way around. This huge web of data collection and sharing is the big problem, not the posts that I'm volunteering to give to FB or the emails I choose to host with Google.
In other words, when you talk to me alone you choose to give me the information, you're aware I will use it in some way to shape my actions. If you tell me your phone broke, I'll offer to sell you my spare, and you won't turn red that I used the info. But if a stranger shows up at your door a minute later to sell you a phone we're suddenly having a different conversation. Same if you go to a pharmacy on the other side of town to buy some medication and the moment you make the payment I send you a text offering my regrets for your illness.
"A lot worse" can mean very different things if you talk in relative or absolute terms, or if you think some practices are just as bad as others.
The problem with ad companies is not that they show ads. But that they are trying to paint a perfect picture of you to sell you stuff. And they are painting that picture by spying on you and your peers.
I hope that you can see the difference between spying on your users and selling that data to advertisers and using telemetry in some product. If you ever worked in software you will know that having telemetry can lead to massive improvements in the product. That said, that data has to be confined to the applicable use case and has to be anonymized.
If you really think there is no difference between ad tracking and telemetry you are right. Apple is a lot worse than people think, but better than Google/Facebook.
But if we are talking just about ads, than Apple is definitely not worse than people think. Because they hardly even have an ad network and when they ask you if you want to be tracked you can just select "No".
You're vastly underestimating the significance of that, as this is personalized too. It's also been shown that you cannot actually opt out of everything, only some things.
At the end of the day, I still consider my Apple devices to be less intrusive then the android and Windows devices I use, but you seem to have an outdated view of Apple's business practices - at least from my perspective
I'm not sure about much worse. It may depend on your own threat model. But here you go:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40006508
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
Personally, I don’t think Apple is bad at all relative to Google/Meta and I’m probably technically “wrong” but those links don’t do much to prove it.
> and another flat out says Google is worse
This one I can guess. Google is worse indeed, except they do not advertise themselves as "Android is privacy". This is why Apple is worse.
> Mind you, this is definitionally a conspiracy theory; please don’t let the connotations of that phrase bias you, but please feel free to read this (and everything else on the internet) as critically as you wish.
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
I will admit that this sentence was easy to miss, hidden deeply at the start of the second sentence of the piece.
These links are just all Apple Does A Thing HN Dislikes and I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad.
> I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad
If it's fine with you that Apple sends info about every file you open on you Mac to their servers, read the corresponding discussion. The comments explain well why it's a serious privacy breach.
Switching to Linux worked for me.
I wonder if everyone's porn habits will one day leak
There is nothing at all wrong with it since you are a direct user of the product or service.
How to turn off the opt-out thing in Firefox 128 which gathers data on your browsing and sends it to third parties.
With this option enabled, unfortunately.
Now, even if technically true for the official distribution (because I don't know, the DRM part, or something like this, although technically, I believe it is not part of this distribution, it is downloaded by open source code on first use), this seems like a weak rebuttal.
But okay, let's dig in anyway. PureOS, a FSF-approved distro listed by your link, has a FSF mirror and this mirror contains Firefox [1]. Mistakes (to be proven) aside, this makes for quite a strong endorsement from the FSF itself, actually.
Now I expect some more substantive argument or I won't answer anymore. I'm a friend, I'm heavily biased toward FLOSS, it's not like I'm trying to downplay your activism around free software, but we need strong, convincing and correct and kind, gentle and respectful arguments if we want this to work. It's not even like I'm trying to defend Firefox at all cost, I don't like some recent moves from Mozilla including this one.
Does any other FSF-approved distro include Firefox? I guess Firefox should not belong to PureOS. If you read the criteria for the free distros, you will see that anything that downloads or even mentions nonfree software should be excluded. Even Debian was excluded for this reason, including one with only "main" repository enabled. Firefox mentions DRM and downloads it in just one click. AFAIK PureOS didn't include Firefox in the beginning, but the users demanded it.
See also: https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-condemns-partnership-between-mo...
From the above link:
> Use a version of Firefox without the EME code
Oh, I found that Firefox in PureOS doesn't include the DRM part: https://forums.puri.sm/t/not-possible-to-enable-drm-content-....
Note that I was just replying to your "Firefox is non-free" statement, not to this. I do agree that the tracking story is way better when using free software in general (but that indeed, it's not a guarantee, especially when using official installers from sloppy software editors).
----
Code that is under a free software license that downloads (and runs) non-free software is still free software.
This can be seen as an anti-feature, F-droid would call this one "Non-Free Addon" [1], but this is a separate matter.
For a distro to be approved by the FSF, it needs to only include free software, and also match additional, more restrictive criteria such as, indeed, not promoting non-free software. But this doesn't qualify some specific software, it qualifies a distribution.
In addition to DRM, Firefox also has other issues, including these:
- it allows non-free addons on its extension repository, and even recommends (promotes) some of them (also Non-Free Addons)
- it includes features that depends on non-free services, like pocket (Non-Free Network Services [2])
I don't like them, but that doesn't make Firefox proprietary. Worst case, it isn't suitable as is for a FSF-approved distro. Which, again, goes beyond the quality of being free software.
The fsf.org blog post you link to (which I'm also familiar with) shares concerns (which I mostly share, indeed), but doesn't state that it makes Firefox non-free software. There's one point that I would debate from this link:
> We agree with Cory Doctorow that there is no meaningful distinction between 'installing DRM' and 'installing code that installs DRM.'
The distinction is meaningful, because embedding the DRM code in Firefox itself would make Firefox non free. However I agree that it makes Firefox promote horrible software without even warning the user, which is not great at all.
tl;dr: The concepts of FSF-approved distro and free software should not be mixed up. They are both useful but separate concepts. I could even see someone being full pro free software but thinking that FSF-approved distro goes too far.
I never thought about it. Why wouldn't it be the same for any software? A distribution is nothing else but a (large) set of software. Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.
Nowadays, in our connected world, it doesn't matter if the software nonfree or it downloads a nonfree piece. It's effectively the same thing.
Then you'd have free software, and then fsf-approved software, a subset of the former.
I guess they defined criteria for distributions specifically because they needed to provide guidance to people building distributions. You have to be specific to be clear and useful, many things are probably irrelevant to general software.
> Nowadays, in our connected world, it doesn't matter if the software nonfree or it downloads a nonfree piece. It's effectively the same thing.
Well, for me a line is definitely crossed between the proprietary code never reaching my computer or the code sitting here. I'm personally comfortable with an option to download proprietary software that is disabled by default.
I'm quite comfortable with Debian offering me to install non free firmware as long as it's optional and clear. I'm fine with its documentation mentioning non-free software as long as it's clearly marked as well (and done reluctantly). Of course I would not be happy with Debian's wiki recommending proprietary software left and right. But I think forbidding to share some knowledge goes a bit too far (it is borderline censorship), and is not even practical: even Purism recommended a way to upgrade the Intel microcode when spectre and meltdown were discovered and mitigated [1]. Although they claim that the patch isn't part of PureOS, they are the ones maintaining the distro, it feels close enough and quite artificial for an update of something that's already running in the CPU anyway.
I believe that it was quite clever of RMS not to try to put those restrictions in the free software definition.
> Do you think one could find a software that downloads something nonfree in the FSF Free Software Directory? I do not expect that.
Typically, Firefox with the non-free extensions.
We need a pure message from the fsf, but I don't believe the fsf-approved distro criteria help a lot, they are so impractical (and borderline undesirable imho for the censorship part) that if free software oriented distros like Debian and Fedora respected them, the free software movement would probably be weaker, with way fewer people being able to switch to a free distro. It would possibly be counter productive, because there would probably be fewer people helping other switch, and working on free replacements.
It's a tradeoff: too many compromises dilute and weaken or even cancel the message. Too few makes the message irrelevant to too many people. And I don't believe discussing solutions based on proprietary software is compromising if done correctly. You at least need to know what to reverse engineer to produce a free alternative. Convincing people that free software is the right way to handle computers is important, and it is far more effective if it is within their reach. Migrating from windows or Mac to a (GNU/)Linux distro but with non-free firmware is already a net win. If the alternative is to just stay on windows, that's possibility way fewer people convinced that free software is the right way to do stuff, and possibility fewer people working on getting rid of proprietary software.
It's complicated.
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-patches-meltdown-and-spectre-va...
> Typically, Firefox with the non-free extensions.
It's not there: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fdirect...
> but I don't believe the fsf-approved distro criteria help a lot, they are so impractical
They are, but it's by design. You are not supposed to follow them as an ordinary user. They were created in order to show the one true freedom as it should exist.
> They are, but it's by design
I don't think anybody actually wants free software without any compromise to be impractical, so no, I would not say by design, it's just a sad reality.
My stronger concern is that it's likely impractical for free software advocacy.
This is not what I meant when I said "by design". I meant that in today's world, striving for the true, pure freedom is very much expected to be impractical, so do not be surprised that the FSF-endorsed distros are unusable. Nobody wants that but it's expected. This however serves as a goal, so not completely useless. I guess we agree.
Yep, I believe so :-)
1. Show ads for apps in AppStore
2. Show ads in the News app.
What else are you thinking of?
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-pay/#:~:te....
It only takes about 30 bits of entropy to perfectly deanonymize everyone, and I know of many companies that have been doing it for at least a decade or more.
And it works very very well.
A feature which they've loudly and publicly said many many times they can't use for tracking your purchases, as they anonymize the data before it gets to them.
Apple has a long history of not using user-generated data for their own use, sometimes to their own detriment.