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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Apple can definitely do wrong, but the companies manoeuvring against them are an order of magnitude worse.

I pay Apple and I’m their customer.

I’m the product of almost every other company that is even vaguely related to mobile devices — especially the companies pushing to force Apple to stop protecting their users from their depredations.

“It’s unfair we can’t exploit your customers to our own advantage!” seems to be the entirety of the arguments.

PS: I stopped buying Epic games years ago because of their generally sleazy behaviour. I just got an iPhone 16 Pro because Apple is the only company I can trust not to abuse AI mercilessly to my detriment. I’m sure that one or more people at Epic are working on using AI to better addict children to loot boxes or whatever, right now.

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What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?

Their shills on reddit keep repeating it.

Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple...

My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.)

So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices.

The Android spec sheet added a line:

   Encryption: Yes

Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever.

They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1].

Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.

As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice.

I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time.

Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.

If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else.

[1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.

> Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.

Android Enterprise Security White Paper

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.android.com/e...

Chrome browser security

https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/chromebrowsersecur...

Google Cloud security Whitepaper

https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google_security_wp...

Facebook

Communicating About Privacy: Towards People- Centered and Accountable Design

https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Privacy-Tran...

By Epic, I'm assuming you don't mean the public interest research center in Washington, DC seeking to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age.

their white paper about the harms of genai is at though https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/EPIC-Generative-...

It's my fault that I wasn't clear in my request: I was specifically requesting some fundamentally new privacy-centric research paper, not pre-existing technologies like SELinux or x.509 being added as a check-list item to appease enterprise customers.

I.e.: From what I can tell, Google spends approximately $0 on privacy research such as security technology that only benefits end-users.

You linked to a bunch of security technologies that Google just copy-pasted into their products to compete with Apple and Microsoft, or to meet large customer requirements.

Also note that GCP is one of the few offerings Google has where the "users are the customers" instead of products. Despite this, there's nothing in that whitepaper you linked that impresses me as unique or special about GCP in comparison to AWS or Azure. I never hear anything out of Google that's even vaguely privacy-first, even in such divisions.

Linking to a paper with the word "privacy" in it from Facebook is just hilarious.

Old goalpost ---> New goalpost.

> Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.

With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3].

Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w...

[4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...

> Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone.

Did they also talk about all the vulnerabilities that can constantly root a phone with a message on imessage, without any user interaction?

Yes multiple ones… because they don't bother (or don't want?) to fix them properly.

You’re being downvoted (by others) because you confused design intention with errors in implementation.

All vendors have bugs in their products, including security bugs.

Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.

Google does not. The entire company exists to drain your personal data into a giant pond for their ad-tech analysts to splash around in.

You are confused. The implementation error is most likely an intentional backdoor that got discovered and reported, and they had to fix, but not too seriously. Except it got found out and reported again.

Remember when apple had their own JRE implementation (forked from sun's) and they were fixing well known vulnerabilities after months rather than hours like sun was doing?

> Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.

Their privacy protecting effort starts and end inside their marketing department. No engineering employee is involved in that. And judging by your posts, it seems their strategy is working great, and they can also mine your data and for money like everyone else as well, while convincing you otherwise.

Apple makes money from selling products.

Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.

The idea of who you think Apple are in your head and who they are in practice are two wildly different things.

https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...

I've never heard of "emarketer.com", and it seems less than 100% reliable as a journalistic source at first glance.

I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor...

Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company.

Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising.

Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year.

So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales.

Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart!

Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine.

(I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)

It’s truly amazing how your reading comprehension and information processing skills seem to change in the face of evidence that doesn’t support your argument.

You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant.

How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.

You chose to link to that source to back up your arguments. I just read the content. Was I not supposed to?

I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.

I see the reading comprehension skills seemed to have magically changed yet again in the last five minutes.

The question that was asked:

> What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?

The response was given:

> Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers

And then I pointed out that despite how Apple would like to publicly portray themselves and how their fans would love to try and convince you otherwise that it is in fact a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar a year business of theirs where they are doing exactly that. The idea that you are not the product is actively wrong.

And I countered that by pointing out that it’s a mere 1.4% of their business.

If a pastry shop also sells sausage rolls, does that make them a butcher shop?

What possible relevance does that have to someone who doesn’t want to be profiled? How does Apple’s end of year financial reports change anything at all on my side as a consumer?

It means their culture is user-first, advertising a distant afterthought. It’s not even in their top ten categories and isn’t broken out into its own reporting category. It tells you that they don’t care about advertising.

Compare this to Google or Facebook, both of which derive about 80-90% of their revenue from advertising, with all other services and products barely an afterthought.

Money, more than anything, drives corporate priorities, culture, and attitudes.

“Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.” — James W Frick

If they didn’t care about it they wouldn’t do it. The reality is that they do and it’s a multi billion dollar per year revenue stream for them. You’re just making shit up here to avoid the obvious conclusion that despite Apple’s propaganda that you are the product on their platform as well.

Apple makes double money by doing both.

That's an odd bone to pick given that Apple (along with Google) are the primary beneficiaries of gambling and other addictive/exploitative features provided by apps on their own platforms.

Apple haven't banned exploitation (e.g. loot boxes), they're just demanding a 30% cut of it.

Would you mind amending your comment to refer to the part of OP’s comment that you were actually referring to? Because I can’t for the life of me work out how what you’ve said remotely refutes anything they said.

Classic whatbaoutism, which is especially absurd when the comment started off with saying that Apple is certainly not perfect. They made their specific point.

You know you can respect Apple products without simping for them, right?

Recognition of good behaviour isn’t “simping”.

I really want to know… how did Apple hurt you?

I’m being serious. There’s a group of people here on HN (and Reddit) that have a seething hatred for Apple, but always for vague unstated reasons. The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” — said by people that prefer Google Android instead because clearly that is the paragon of user privacy.

So I ask you: please engage in conversation instead of name-calling.

> The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!”

You are completely out of your mind. That is never the argument used against Apple. As mentioned before, you can like your iPhone without simping for them.

What is the argument against Apple then?

Did you read the article? It is about the App Store.

Most of tech at my home is from Apple. My gf uses Apple exclusively.

I have seething hatred for Apple simps and blind fanatics that think their Cupertino dictator can’t do wrong. They’re just an extremely rich company that produces quality products - nothing more.

You're not allowed to like apple, this is hackernews. Didn't you read the rules?

There's some interesting cliques in various subreddits and Hacker News, and it's always entertaining to see these groups get riled up when I defend their favourite boogieman.

My favourite is the small army of ex-Twitter employees frequenting HN who have a visceral hatred for Elon Musk and will rabidly hound anyone that says something even vaguely positive about anything he's ever touched.

There ware some entertaining foaming-at-the-mouth rants about how SpaceX is destroying wildlife with tap water.

Elon musk? Isn't he the guy that accuses of paedophilia anyone who dares disagree with him? Yeah I think he's an outstanding guy. Can't understand why anyone would dislike him really.

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