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Comment by bramhaag | Hacker News Reader

Apple's response to the UK gov asking to see users' iCloud data says enough about where their priorities lie [1]. They do something far worse in China [2].

Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...

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The UK public can still vote for governments that don’t demand backdoors into citizens’ private data. Instead, over the past century they’ve turned their country into an ineffectual nanny state of shrinking global relevance, while a fading aristocratic and old money class desperately cling to influence over a population that no longer cares about the old titles and prestige of having attended some ‘old boys’ boarding school nobody outside of GB has ever heard of.

They’re very clear about when they use e2e encryption and atleast I know when they don’t. There’s multiple reasons I don’t use iCloud.

Your links say that Apple complies with the laws of major countries. Which companies don’t do that?

Signal is one example. Their values are simply not compatible with what the Chinese government wants (local data storage, key access, etc.). Instead of complying and putting their users' privacy at risk, they accepted the ban.

Google, out of all companies, also decided to partially walk away from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns [1].

Nobody is forcing Apple to do business in China, or the UK. They actively choose to do so, and because of that also put themselves in a position where they have to comply with these laws, presumably because it makes them more money.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html

Google also chooses to be a US company even thought the US is supporting a genocide and is doing an illegal war against a foreign country (again)

You could argue Signal is the most "moral" here, but even then they don't really allow self-hosted backends and refuse to open-source their setup

Signal responds to warrants with all the the data they keep.

ProtonMail / ProtonVPN responds to the vast majority of warrants with the data they keep.

Apple iCloud always responded to iCloud warrants with whatever data they had (eg. If the user didn’t enable encryption). They shouldn’t have removed end-to-end encryption for the UK, but they have thousands of employees in that country and millions of customers.

Sometimes it’s not the company that is the problem, but the country / legislators.

Google of all companies didn't. And we all know how much they care about privacy.

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