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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

Remember the fuss people made about the Google Glass?

Turns out that people become okay with cameras every few inches observing every action as long as you say "It's for gestures.", even though the data stream will inevitably make it back to corpo for training ( and voyeurism[0] by the other parties that'll be in the room).

Same excuse for the VR headsets. "Oh, it has a red LED that fires when recording!" , meanwhile the thing has 30 other IR cams in non-stop loops consuming the environment at power-on til death.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/uk/nsa-staff-used-spy-...

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My experience working at Apple was that private information does not leave the device. All our training data came from contractors who were hired to perform data collection and not from the general public.

If Apple really walked the walk about their privacy marketing, it would sunset all their APIs used for tracking, making impractically hard for advertisers to track you. Not warning "do you still want to be tracked?", but remaking their whole stack to make tracking unreasonably hard.

Currently I see Apple as safer than, say Google or Microsoft, but not as the privacy bastion it claims to be.

>Not warning "do you still want to be tracked?", but remaking their whole stack to make tracking unseasonably hard.

It's opt in, and the bolded option is "ask app not to track", so I'm really not sure what the issue is here.

It's clear it doesn't bother you, but I'll try to explain my posture.

Years ago, Apple's Weather app sourced their data from The Weather Channel. That meant these three tracking options ragasrding your location:

- Always share - You get real-time weather alerts, very useful some seasons

- Share while using - You get current weather, but lose real-time alerts

- Do not share - Might as well uninstall the app

Then Apple made Apple Weather, which collects weather data from multiple sources, and is supposedly safer to share real-time location with since Apple won't share it with anyone. Before this, The Weather Channel had the real-time location of millions worldwide, and all Apple had for privacy was that prompt.

This is the kind of stack reengineering I'm talking about, that makes privacy a real proposal, but applied deeper so it really makes a difference.

>- Do not share - Might as well uninstall the app

Unless you're some sort of globetrotter going to a new city every week, the app is quite usable just by adding your city.

>Before this, The Weather Channel had the real-time location of millions worldwide

Are you sure apple wasn't proxying the traffic through their servers?

edit: for instance the stocks app very prominently shows the data is from yahoo stocks, but if you check "most contacted domains" in app privacy report, they're all apple domains. It doesn't contact yahoo at all.

You are one PRISM type request and one gag order from a silent update changinf that.

In fact, it could have been the case already and you would not have known ir.

>You are one PRISM type request and one gag order from a silent update changinf that.

Wouldn't the bigger issue be that they can abuse the same thing to grab camera and or microphone from your phone? Probably more useful than airpods too, given that a phone's always on, unlike airpods.

> My experience working at Apple was that private information does not leave the device.

iCloud ? CSAM scanning ?

It reminds me of that principle of how people are more likely to be receptive to your request if you preface it with "because..."

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