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Comment by DetectDefect | Hacker News Reader

> I don't pretend that Apple is saintly, but their profit model is currently to make money through premium prices on premium products

Is this statement based on anything other than Apple marketing materials, perhaps a meaningful qualification from an independent third party? I worry this falsehood is being repeated so much it has become "truth".

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For some reason, some people have this inexplicable rose-tinted vision of Apple. Until they release the source code of their products, the only rational stance is to treat their software as malware.

If further evidence is necessary, any Apple device that I have owned pings multiple Apple domains several times per minute, despite disabling every cloud dependency that can be disabled. The roles of the domains are partially documented, but traffic is encrypted and it is impossible to know for sure what information Apple is exfiltrating. It is certainly a lot more than a periodic software update check. It certainly seems that Apple is documenting how people interact with the devices they own very closely. That's an insane amount of oversight over people's lives considering that some (most?) people use their phones as their primary computer.

I just opened Activity Monitor - a process called "dasd" is the 5th largest consumer of CPU time. What does it do? Apple does not want you to know. Apple also will not let you disable it. Apple will not even tell you if this process is legitimate (it is signed by "Software Signing" lmao).

    $ man dasd
    No manual entry for dasd

There are like two dozen processes like this, half of which open network connections despite me never invoking any Apple services or even built-in apps. macOS has basically become malware.

It schedules low-priority background processes.

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/01/23/scheduled-activities-1-s...

Until we see the source code (or at least a man page) that is an unverified claim and the process should be treated like malware:

    while : ; do pkill -9 dasd ; sleep 10 ; done

The tasks it "schedules" must be very low-priority, because nothing breaks when dasd doesn't run.

That's...what background processes do? They're supposed to run occasionally and be resilient to disruption.

But if you wanna be afraid of boring ordinary things, you go right ahead.

Even excusing that daemon, here is a list of processes which have attempted to contact Apple in the past 24 hours, according to Little Snitch. I am certain this is not even a complete list, because macOS is closed source and likely can bypass application firewalls altogether:

    akd -> gsa.apple.com
    nsurlsessiond -> gateway.icloud.com
    nsurlsessiond -> mesu.apple.com
    nsurlsessiond -> gdmf-ados.apple.com
    nsurlsessiond -> gdmf.apple.com
    adprivacyd -> bag.itunes.apple.com
    CloudTelemetryService -> gateway.icloud.com
    cloudd -> gateway.icloud.com
    amsondevicestoraged -> bag.itunes.apple.com
    tipsd -> ipcdn.apple.com
    parsec-fbf -> fbs.smoot.apple.com
    parsec-fbf -> swallow.apple.com
    com.apple.geod -> gspe1-ssl.ls.apple.com
    identityservicesd -> init.ess.apple.com

Again, I have never used iCloud/Apple services, turned off all available telemetry options and did not open any Apple applications while all this took place (I only use Firefox and iTerm). Almost all of these processes lack a man page, or if they have one, it's one-line nonsense which explains nothing. This is beyond unprofessional.

The scheduling shouldn't be the 5th largest consumer of CPU. The question is what is it scheduling. Collecting data about user behavior would be a background task, you know..

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it certainly rhymes. Is there proof that Apple is monetizing our data with third parties? It's very clear how almost every other major company is, but Apple's been reasonably respectful about it.

They’re certainly monetizing your data with first parties

Google is also vehemently opposed to selling your data to third parties. That's how they keep themselves as the middleman between advertisers and users. What they do is allow detailed behavioral targeting. Apple prefers to expose contextual targeting data to advertising instead. Apple is also better about not letting advertisers run random scripts.

But frankly the difference between the two companies seems more a matter of degree than kind. It's not like Apple has a strong, principled stance against collecting data. They have a strong principled stance against other ad networks collecting user data, which looks a lot like anticompetitiveness. Their first party software collects identifiable data on you regardless of whether you opt out. They just avoid using that to target you if you opt out.

The reason Apple says their advertising doesn't track you is because they define "tracking" as purchasing third party data, not first party data collection.

> Is there proof that Apple is monetizing our data with third parties?

Other than a history replete of cooperation with domestic and foreign state surveillance, which in exchange allow its market position, you mean?

What falsehood? That apple's profit mix is much less advertising than its competitors is just a fact about their incentives in the moment. He didn't really go all that far in claiming anything beyond that being better than the alternative of being mostly an advertising company.

It's based on their balance of ad vs produce revenue thus far.

its a proprietary black box with a billion dollar marketing budget like all apple devices

Repeating "this falsehood" doesn't make it a falsehood either.

Nothing is false about asking to prove a unicorn exists.

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