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Apple spent a good amount of time and money putting out marketing to convince people that their brand emphasizes privacy. This was part of a brand recovery effort after quite a few folks' intimate photos were leaked out of iCloud.
But it's become evident, as in the post you replied to, that they aren't as privacy-friendly as their marketers want you to believe. You should consider alternatives for your computing needs - specifically, open-source software which is not in control of large corporations.
The post they replied to doesn’t make anything “evident” it just claims without basis that if you want privacy you should stop using Apple products.
I mean sure in an absolute sense that’s true. Using Apple products gives them some information about you. But relatively speaking, Apple tends to collect significantly less data about its users than its competitors: Meta, Google, Microsoft, et al.
The OP of this thread gave a specific example of Apple circumventing user privacy in a way that I would find unacceptable. "Replied to" was not the best phrasing for that, I admit.
Presumably just like most users don’t want to do that, most users also don’t want to learn enough to admin a Linux system, run their own domain and email server, and keep a NAS at home as their “cloud” storage.
If you assume that users want someone else to handle this stuff for them, then yes, “not as bad as” is a great argument.
My point is that if you want to chase privacy absolutism, a shack in the woods is where you inevitably end up. If you accept that people want to use consumer-focused goods and services that come with some privacy cost—as basically fucking everyone but a minute rounding error does—there are alternatives that are better than others. And so it’s absolutely worth comparing those alternatives.
If you want to run Tails on RISC V, route all your traffic through Tor, and conduct all your transactions with Monero then more power to you.
Imagine a world where, in the past twenty years, big companies started making transparent bathroom doors. And thanks to marketing, media, celebrity endorsemets etc., transparent bathroom doors have become the new norm. It worked, and most bathroom doors are now transparent or translucent.
I'm one of the people pointing out that we can get doors made of wood, and it's pretty easy to do so.
And you're the guy saying "that's so weird! Basically fucking everyone uses some degree of transparency on their bathroom doors, therefore it's normal and good, and should continue to be encouraged. Besides, this one company makes translucent bathroom doors - that's better, right?"
Where people stand on this question ultimately lies in whether they trust what Apple says. For example, Gatekeeper / OCSP, the service mentioned in the GP. Apple says the following:
> Gatekeeper performs online checks to verify if an app contains known malware and whether the developer’s signing certificate is revoked. We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are using on their devices.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102445
That's either true or it isn't. If it's true, then the GP comment is wrong about "Hey Siri who is using Tor", if it's not true, they are correct. Blocking the service using a hosts file works, and does not prevent applications from opening, a case can be made that this should be even easier with a system preferences setting, but we come back to the same question: if you trust what Apple says about the service, making it easy to disable (and blocking a DNS entry is not especially difficult) would be foolish, because the threat landscape does include malware, and does not include Apple sharing information (they claim that) they don't have, about what programs users open.
If Apple is lying, or one thinks Apple is lying, then the problems do not end with Gatekeeper. They could be logging every key I type, faking E2EE through some clever obfuscated code, and so on. Blocking the OSCP server will do nothing, they can exfiltrate anything they want from an operating system which they alone control.
I happen to believe Apple's privacy claims are honest. This is based on a couple of things: primarily, privacy is a valuable (to them) and emphasized part of their brand, and any discovered breach of trust would be hugely detrimental to their bottom line. Also, there's a dog which didn't bark, in the form of an absence of whistleblowers reporting on how Apple's privacy claims are bullshit and they actually pwn everything.
TL;DR there are OSes which claim to offer more privacy than Apple, but now you're trusting ~everyone who has contributed software to those operating systems instead. I also happen to think that e.g. Qubes and Tails do improve on privacy over the macOS etc. baseline, but I can't prove that, anymore than I can demonstrate that Apple isn't lying.
It is physically impossible to audit all the code we run personally. It just can't be done. So trust is a non-optional component of making decisions about privacy and security. It will always be thus.