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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

I’m not the person you asked, but I agree with them. To answer your question: No, I do not use iCloud to store my photos. Even if I did, consent to store data is not the same as consent to scan or run checks on it. For a company whose messaging is all about user consent and privacy, that matters.

This would be easily solvable: On first run show a window with:

> Hey, we have this new cool feature that does X and is totally private because of Y [link to Learn More]

> Do you want to turn it on? You can change your mind later in Settings

> [Yes] [No]

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When iCloud syncs between devices how do you think that happens without storing some type of metadata?

You don’t use iCloud for anything? When you change phones do you start fresh or use your computer for backups? Do sync bookmarks? Browsing history?

Do you use iMessage?

In response to your question in the parent comment, no, I do not use iCloud. And I do not sync any of the things you mentioned here. If someone already consented to using iCloud to store their photos then I would not consider the service mentioned this post to be such a big issue, because Apple would already have the data on their servers with the user's consent.

edit: I will just add, even if we accept the argument that it's extremely secure and impossible to leak information, then where do we draw the line between "extremely secure" and "somewhat secure" and "not secure at all"? Should we trust Apple to make this decision for us?

Do you start fresh with an iOS installation after each upgrade or do you back up your iPhone using your computer and iTunes?

I do not have anything backed up on any cloud servers on any provider. If I had to buy a new phone I would start from a fresh installation and move all of my data locally. It's not that I'm a "luddite", I just couldn't keep track of all of the different ways each cloud provider was managing my data, so I disabled all of them.

If only Apple had a centralized backup service that could store everything automatically at a click of a button so you wouldn’t have to juggle multiple cloud providers…

I kinda was somewhat with you until this point.

Apple IS just another cloud provider / centralized backup service. It's not fundamentally different than others, and if you're not in select group of whatever the respectful term is for those who stay strictly inside apple ecosystem, you will have multiple clouds and multiple data sets and multiple backups that all interact with each other and your heterogeneous devices in unpredictable ways. Icloud will not help you with that any more than google cloud or Samsung cloud etc. They all want to own all of your stuff, neither is simply a hyper helpful neutral director.

The “fundamental difference” is that it’s better integrated with your device and can backup the internal state of your device and the apps.

Even if you use Microsoft Office or GSuite and save using the standard file picker, you can save to iCloud. iCloud has a native app for Windows and plug ins on Windows to sync browser bookmarks for Chrome, Edge and Firefox

And the alternative people are proposing are four or five self hosted solutions?

Again, I think there's an assumption of single device / ecosystem loyalty in your statement? I have an android phone and iOS phone and three android tablets and a bunch of laptops with various operating systems.

Iphone is "just another device". I don't feel Icloud is any better integrated with my Samsung note, than google is integrated with my iPhone - in fact, the opposite. Google, for example, CAN sync my photos across iphone and Android and windows devices. Whereas my wife knows the primeval scream from the home office every 6 months I try to claw photos out of apple's greedy selfish hands :-)

For people who JUST use iphone, sure, Icloud is the boss just like for people who JUST use e.g. Samsung galaxy the Samsung cloud is awesome. But that's not a high bar. I feel we are still lacking empathy here for people like original poster who may have more than one device in their lives.

And none of these can sync your bookmarks, iOS settings or store the internal state of apps on your iPhone.

And I wouldn’t have the same arguments if they weee using Google cloud. But they are concerned about “privacy” and trust Google?

But my argument is about people thinking that Apple or Google should care about the minuscule number of people who are hosting their own syncing services

Not all apps support Apple’s backup solution. Threema and Signal come to mind.

And that is because of policy choices by Signal.

So because of policy choices made by app developers, you have to manage multiple cloud solutions.

Or as the GP suggested, forego the cloud entirely. iCloud and Apple’s built in iOS backup is not a magic bullet unfortunately.

By one lone outlier who decides for “security” that the don’t want to support the platforms backup solution. That app purchase didn’t have to do anything besides store information locally in their sandbox

Does Signal allow the user to opt-in/opt-out into their policy? Or are they forcing this policy on their users?

No. They do not allow users to opt in

> If someone already consented to using iCloud to store their photos then I would not consider the service mentioned this post to be such a big issue, because Apple would already have the data on their servers with the user's consent.

No, if you enable Advanced Data Protection for iCloud[1], the photos stored in Apple Photos are end to end encrypted.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108756

Some iOS apps synchronize data with standard protocols (e.g. IMAP, WebDAV, CalDAV) to cloud or self-hosted services.

And that doesn’t help with internally stored data within apps, settings, which apps you have installed on what screen, passwords, etc

iOS supports local device backups.

None of that is relevant to my point. You seem to be trying to catch people in some kind of gotcha instead of engaging honestly with the problem at hand. But alright, I’ll bite.

Yes, I always start with clean installs, both on iOS and on macOS. Sometimes I even restart fresh on the same device, as I make sure my hardware lasts. I don’t sync bookmarks, I keep them in Pinboard and none of them has any private or remotely identifiable information anyway. I don’t care about saving browser history either, in fact I have it set to periodically auto-clear, which is a feature in Safari.

No I am trying to say with a connected device using online services, the service provider is going to have access to your data that you use to interact with them.

To a first approximation, everyone in 2024 expects their data and settings to be transferred across devices.

People aren’t working as if it is 2010 when you had to backup and restore devices via iTunes. If I’m out of town somewhere and my phone gets lost, damaged or stolen, I can buy another iPhone, log into my account and everything gets restored as it was.

Just as I expect my watch progress to work when I use Netflix between my phone, iPad, Roku devices etc.

And that should rightfully be your informed choice. Just like everyone else should have the right to know what data their devices are sending before it happens and be given the informed choice to refuse. People shouldn’t have to learn that from a random blog post shared on a random website.

In what world is Netflix for instance not going to know your watch history?

How many people are going to say in 2024 that they don’t want continuous cloud backup? You want Windows Vista style pop ups and permissions?

How many times are you going to shift the goalposts? This is getting tiresome, so I’ll make it my last reply.

I don’t have Netflix but neither is that relevant to the point, you’re obviously and embarrassingly grasping at straws.

No one is arguing against continuous cloud backups, they’re arguing about sending data without consent. Which, by the way, is something Apple used to understand not to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

Apple’s OS are already filled with Windows Vista style popups and permissions for inconsequential crap, people have been making fun of them for that for years.

If you are doing continuous cloud backups and using Apple services - you are already giving Apple your data and your solution is to add even more permissions? You are not going to both use any Apple service that requires an online component and keep Apple from having your data.

Isn’t it bad enough that I have a popup every time I copy and paste between apps?

> Isn’t it bad enough that I have a popup every time I copy and paste between apps?

For me, not really no. It reminds me I am copying information and not from some phishing app, I find it informative.

And I'm probably one of the few who actually click "Reject" to the cookie pop ups having to click no on 3742 legitimate consents.

The simple answer is everything should be opt-out. I'll opt-in if I require it because frankly, regardless to how Fort-Knox my data is $CORP still cannot be trusted.

If that’s the case, you aren’t using email either or messaging?

Strictly Signal via self-hosted VPN for messages. My email web client provided by my email server (Zimbra) which are hosted on colocated servers. 3cx for calls via self-hosted PBX.

Video conferencing instead of FaceTime are made via self-hosted Jitsi and if I am to brag all running on FreeBSD.

Out of Apple or Google I trust neither however will align with Apple more than Google. It's as close as I can get from not having data collected from mongrels.

As a general principle, I think computers should execute commands that users issue, and then wait for the next command. That's it.

Computers should not be sneakily doing things in the background without my commanding them to do so. But if they insist that the only way they can work is by doing things in the background, then I expect the computer to at the very least obtain my consent before doing those things. And computers should definitely not be exfiltrating anything over to the network without my explicit command to do so. This shit world we are living in where your computer just does whatever the application developer wants it to do rather than what the user wants it to do has to come to an end!

Netflix being unable to know your watch history on their service is exactly the goal of homomorphic encryption. The technology to make that work at that scale does not exist, however for smaller bits of data, eg phone numbers, that's entirely possible!

With PIR, an Apple phone recieving a phone call queries Apple's database with that phone number, but because it's using homomorphic encryption, Apple doesn't know the number that called despite looking it up in their database to provide caller id info, so they can't tie your phone number and the callers phone number together.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...

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