Hacker News Reader

> And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.

I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.

Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.

Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.

Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.

Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.

You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.

I disagree with you. I think the majority of Apple's promises are purely marketing. And this is a moment where the mask has slipped. Your account does not allow for the case where Apple can successfully convince their users that they are privacy-oriented while simultaneously not being privacy oriented.

A great example of this is that they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken. An actual privacy-centric product, this would be a major problem. Consider Signal.

Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.

There is no giant moat between Apple and privacy violation. They'll do it whenever they feel like it, and Apple customers are very forgiving.

> they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken.

It’s not completely broken. For average users, erring on the side of being able to restore from backup is the best choice. For people who need more security, that’s what Advanced Data Protection is for. You have the choice of which option suits you best; I think the default is appropriate for typical users.

> Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.

What happened was they put a huge amount of effort into building a system that goes as far as it possibly can to implement CSAM detection that could work on E2E encrypted photo libraries while maintaining as much privacy as possible.

The design of the feature demonstrates they put a lot of effort into privacy – competitors just scan everything that’s uploaded to them, while Apple went above and beyond to do something a lot more difficult. The entire point of it was to detect without Apple having to have access to your photo library. There’s no point to design a system like that if they weren’t prioritising privacy – they could just scan on the server like everybody else if privacy isn’t a priority.

And what happened – everybody freaked out anyway, so they cancelled the feature. It’s an example that supports my point. Apple respond to incentives.

Personally, I wish they hadn’t cancelled the feature. Virtually everybody complaining about it didn’t understand how it worked and thought it worked in a completely different way.

I sense that you're arguing in good faith, but your first argument is very strange.

The purpose of end-to-end encryption is that the messages cannot be read even by Apple. This is a feature that they advertise in their webpage about iMessage security.

All I'm saying is that a bunch of people believe that iMessage supports end-to-end encryption and at the same time know that their messages are encrypted by a key that Apple holds and can decrypt them with via iCloud backup.

That's quite literally marketing a privacy-centric product and having the reality (for the vast majority of users using the defaults) be substantially different than what was promised.

To put it even more starkly, Apple advertises that they can't read your messages, and yet they can.

- iMessage supporting E2E encryption is a good thing.

- The right choice for the average user is to prefer recoverable backups.

- Recoverable backups undermine E2E encryption.

- Apple provides Advanced Data Protection which disables a bunch of things like recoverable iCloud backups in favour of more secure measures.

Apple deciding that ADP is not appropriate for the average user does not mean that “their promises are purely marketing”. They implemented it. It’s real. You can switch ADP on at any time. It’s just not the default, for good reason.

The incident we are discussing absolutely disproves this! Apple is happy to jeopardize privacy and the very idea of it, for a quick buck blasting an ad to all its users. They don't care one way or the other.

But the truth is, nobody really cares about privacy, least of all, users. Nobody ever bought an iPhone because of "privacy"; people buy iPhones because they work, and because they seem cool. Everyone's happy to hand over data to any service.

Facebook has three billion users.

The reason why even the most die-hard Apple fans are up in arms about this is because it’s such a break from Apple’s normal standards. It’s the exception that proves the rule. This harms Apple more than it benefits them.

No, it proves that large organizations have competing priorities and that they can make bad decisions.

So if Apple really cares about privacy, their products send less telemetry than my Linux system, correct?

I agree with this point as well. I had the privilege of talking to a telemetry ingestion engineer at Apple, and I learned quite a bit about the amount of data they collect on their users. It's absolutely staggering.

> So if Apple really cares about privacy

This is a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing that Apple “really cares” about privacy; quite the opposite – I was arguing that it doesn’t matter if Apple “really cares”, what matters is that they are financially and strategically incentivised to be pro-privacy.

Linux is not Apple’s competitor. Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.

> Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.

Yeah, that's the sad thing. And on mobile their only competitor is Google... so they don't have to be really good at privacy.

> Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.

have you used the app store in the last few years?

I search for my bank and the first results are a load of scammy crypto app ads

then my actual bank app is at result number 3

this is the sort of behaviour I would have expected from Google

The fact that they make money doing something doesn't stop hungry PMs and VPs from pushing other revenue sources.

Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.

If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.

Apple needs to show revenue growth every single year. Their hardware and services businesses will eventually tap out, and then they'll start mining their users for data and advertising. It's a miracle they've managed to avoid it for so long, but they will eventually be forced to. It will probably coincide with Tim Cook's retirement, unfortunately.

> Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.

and by selling ads, seriously, just open their app store.

> And because it has positioned itself

And they can continue that while simultaneously doing the opposite. There is no law against inconsistent behavior

> Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?

Yes, of course, that's easy to find via a 5 sec google search

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-window...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712440/gmail-ads-more-an...

Privacy and advertising are not mutually exclusive.

Privacy is also about having control over your own space, both physically and digitally, and being free from unwanted intrusion or interference.

For me, such a notification is an unwanted intrusion, and it is not compatible with privacy.

Privacy and targeted advertising are, which is the name of the game

Advertising on old style TV, newspapers, billboards did not impact on privacy. Even non targeted advertising on the web can impact privacy because our browsers send requests to the ad servers and that's the beginning of fingerprinting, even with Javascript disabled.

The only way it would work on the web while fully preserving privacy would be if (1) ads were stored on the server of the website you're accessing or proxied by it, and (2) the website owner would never give the ad provider server logs. It can be done (and used to be).

When i first got into web hosting in the early noughties this is how i remember it being done. Want to advertise my game server on some site? Provide an image url and a link url. That was it.

This is technically correct, but supporting examples are statistically insignificant.

> lack of openness

Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.

Lack of openness means a lack of privacy in theory, but in practice, openness often results in less privacy. The average user lacks the knowledge, time, and motivation to install and configure open systems to maximize privacy. They're likely to make mistakes that expose private data.

A closed system that prioritizes privacy will result in more users benefiting from greater privacy overall, even if it does give the platform more control than is ideal. And that's the issue with the wallet ads: Apple makes users more secure on average, but it depends on user trust, which it just betrayed.

Those who can take advantage of total control are a minority, and they are not really the people Apple cares about.

Such a false dichotomy that open automatically means insecure and leaky due to user error.

Sensible defaults and warnings about changing them is all you need to put any argument of 'bad for privacy' down.

It’s not a dichotomy, but an observation about how data privacy tends to work in the real world. You can easily refute it with practical examples of how openness has actually improved privacy for the average user relative to Apple’s closed, managed privacy programs. Would an average non-technical Apple user be exposed to higher or lower security and privacy risk if they moved from Apple platforms to open platforms?

It is a dichotomy though as its confusing correlation with causation.

There is no causal relationship between open platforms and being bad for privacy. Look at bluesky vs facebook.

Just because android failed in some ways doesnt mean apples way is better. Its a duopoly. There are open source alternatives focused on privacy...with very low user bases.

A non-open system is not verifyable and therefore not trustable. Therefore a non-open system can never deliver privacy. At best it can attempt to trick you into believing it does.

Risk isn’t an absolute. Open systems may be verifiable, but they are also more difficult to use, inconvenient, and lack the features users want. So most people won’t use them or will use them badly. Apple reduces privacy risk relative to open solutions used by non-expert users. The purist approach to privacy increases risk to ordinary users. It’s better to be pragmatic; Apple isn’t ideal, but it’s better than the realistic alternatives.