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Comment by Gabriel54 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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

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

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