This is the correct response. Either everyone has protection or no one has. Not that I’d trust apple anyway but by pulling the service your average person is likely to make some noise because they can feel the effect.
I’m not even an Apple user but somehow I still feel like Apple is one of the very last companies where privacy and the security of your data is more worth than a dime.
Nope, Apple sells your data just as much as Google does: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/apple-ad-revenues-skyrocket-amid-its-privacy-changes https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/22/23513061/apple-iphone-app-store-ads-privacy-antitrust#luMMel
While people noticed their new policies against 3rd party apps, that masked the fact that those policies carved out an exception for first party apps, meaning they collect (anonymous) data on you through Health, Journal, Music, etc. just like every other company. “Trusting them more” is simply a result of you and everyone else getting hit with their privacy ads recently.
Edit: “just like every other company” meant Google and Microsoft, i.e. the other big equivalent tech companies, my fault for not being specific.
I feel like wuth the amount of stuff done on device and not in the cloud with iPhones and other Apple products, saying that Apple sells just as much as Google is at the very least disingenuous…
While I’m all for calling out companies for abusing your privacy, your own links show that they don’t collect as much data as google. They could (and should) be better though.
There is a massive leap between collecting data and selling your data.
I am against both but in the digital age actually knowing who has your data is such a relief. My old email got sold to third party’s a bit to many times and to this day 80% of the incoming messages are blatant generic America targeted phishing.
Anonymous data is actually pretty different to the data everyone else collects, which literally has your name and picture
Apple’s data is useful for trends but it can’t be used to study who I am.
Health is on-device, and is E2EE. To my knowledge, that’s always been the case. They do allow optional data linking services, but those need to be setup by the end-user. Apple should have no knowledge of this data, by default. Notes can be E2EE (with ADP), and with Journal (a new iOS feature) being E2EE. Music is a paid for service, with no ads, and is one of the more privacy respecting options. Data is needed for Music to help serve the user, and suggest artists/songs… it’s literally one of the platforms benefits, over self-hosting.
@zettajon @hardypart there is nothing stating that Apple is using your data, selling your data, or even getting your data. While it did create a situation where ad dollars are going to App Store it’s still not targeted other than by search. Your own posted link says nothing about what you claimed. There are plenty of issues to bring up about Apple without the need of fabricating one.
Did you read the article you posted? Apple serve you ads, they don’t sell your data. And they allow you to opt out of tracking. It’s all right there in your article.
Any company that obfuscates all their security practices, refuses to give statistics on security risks and counter measures, and boils their product security down to “Trust us, bro.”, doesn’t actually give a fuck about your security. They’re just the last company who is still able to keeps everything secret so they can make shit up as they go along. Apple’s security is a joke and they’re just as bad as any other manufacturer on the market, the only difference is they have successfully kept their shit secret for all these years and spent decades convincing people they actually give a fuck about security.
I still remember a few years ago having a conversation with a coworker about her iphone and she bragged about Apple never being hacked and this was right after I had just got done reading an article about a large scale hack on their network. Of course Apple never said a damned thing about it, so I forwarded her the article. IIRC she mumbled something about how the article was probably not accurate. Apple fanatics do some crazy mental gymnastics to justify them spending thousands on a phone thats probably worth about $300 at best(their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market).
Did you know that most celebrity phone hacks are thru apple accounts?
obfuscates all their security practices
https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-security-guide.pdf
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-protection-for-icloud-sec973254c5f/web
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/cloudkit/encrypting_user_data
I had just got done reading an article about a large scale hack on their network
Source? Or should I just “trust you bro”
Did you know that most celebrity phone hacks are thru apple accounts?
Did you know that most celebrities own iPhones by a far margin? These aren’t the encryption was broken hacks when someone is getting into an iCloud account, these are social engineering hacks. That’s what happens when your publicist, your agent, and others have access to your digital accounts so they can get you a new phone quick while you are on the road, grab the photos you took on your phone from your iCloud account to share, etc. More holes in security.
about $300 at best(their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market)
Flagship android phones, barring a few exceptions, are not sold without pre-installed apps that subsidize the cost of the phone.
Do you have an example of a device priced at $300 with competitive hardware to the base iPhone 14, without bloatware subsidizing the cost of the device? I’d accept that generally iPhones are ~$100-200 above the price of devices with competitive hardware, but a current gen iPhone having $300 hardware? The specs are very similar to other devices in similar price ranges
I’ve owned both Pixels and iPhones before. While each has its pros and cons, I’ve found that the app sandboxing, default settings, and ability to opt out of telemetry was always better on iPhone. And until google has free, easy-to-use E2E encryption for Android devices and the related cloud services, customer data on Google’s servers is more at risk to be stolen/sold for profit/used without explicit user consent.
Apple processors outperform flagship android phones on benchmarks every generation. Where are you getting your information?
iMessage isn’t a big loss in the UK. FaceTime would be.
WhatsApp pulling out of the UK would have the biggest impact. Almost everyone uses it here.
Can confirm, it had swipe to reply for a while now, it’s coming to iMessage in next iOS… The only thing that annoys me about WhatsApp is the high picture compression resulting in low quality images.
If you need to send uncompressed images send it as a “document” rather than an image. You won’t get the preview but it’ll be the same file as on your phone.
WhatsApp also uses E2EE, wouldn’t also be targeted under this same legislation?
Meta pulling WhatsApp out of the UK would affect way more people.
The incumbent government is circling the drain and are, it seems, determined to leave a trail of destruction and burned bridges for their successors to repair.
In the UK, even conservatives hate the conservatives. It’s quite impressive, really.
No offence but isn’t a very similar policy about banning end-to-end encryption also in talk in the EU
Absolutely don’t agree with it, will be the beginning of the end for privacy but this is more of a European wide (and even world wide) push for a close to e2e encryption
GDPR is basically encrypt your shit and you’ll be fine. If they are seriously considering banning encryption the IT sector might as well shut up shop and run for the hills.
It’s so bad the UK politicians actually use non MDM unmanaged devices so they can install whichever app they see fit. Tiktok you name it.
We won a physical war via encryption and we’ll lose a digital one without it.
Why don’t politicians just fuck off?
Nothing they ever do about anything leads to an improvement.
I mean, I hate politicians too but they did give us organizations like OSHA that protect us at work. Not all politicians are pieces of shit…but certainly MOST are.
“politicians never do anything good” is a myopic viewpoint that is completely understandable in the modern political climate, i think. which is unfortunate, because a political party that learned to harness that energy to actually become known for doing good could probably grow very quickly
I agreed that they should definitely fuck off, but this will be pushed y the security services. A change of government won’t change the drive for this sort of bollocks.
“Oh but what about the criminals, terrorists and pedos?”
What about all the people that aren’t that who loose their privacy?
“Oh but what about the criminals, terrorists and pedos?”
What about the Windsors?
Good on them
There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.
It’s their brand. And I’m glad it is. It’s something Samsung can’t copy (I presume because of the Google backbone) or attack.
(Written on a Samsung phone btw.)
Edit. I should probably add why it’s good even when I’m not in their ecosystem. It raises the bar for competition and shows that privacy adds value.
I don’t know if they actually care, but I think they figured privacy was a great niche to jump in when they started losing more and more market share to android
It’s a brilliant move for Apple because Google can’t play that game.
Google is fundamentally an advertising company. They materially benefit from user data in providing a more valuable service to advertisers. If Google takes a strong stance on privacy, it could disadvantage the primary business.
Yup. They have had issues (think CSAM scandal), but they’re slowly earning back my trust. I’m still a bit wary, but for big tech they have a pretty good track record.
They have had issues (think CSAM scandal)
People like you that think that was a “scandal” are half the problem though.
What they were doing with the on-device CSAM scanning as part of the upload to iCloud only was actually good for your privacy. It enabled them to comply with any current and future CSAM laws while protecting your privacy by doing the scanning on your device. It meant that they could then add E2E encryption to iCloud (and then iMessage as well) while still complying with CSAM laws. The alternative - and what everyone else does including google, microsoft, imgur, dropbox, etc - is doing the CSAM scanning in the cloud after you’ve uploaded it completely insecurely, requiring the data to be stored unencrypted and visible to those companies (and the government).
Doing it on device should have been applauded, but it was attacked by people that didn’t understand how it’s actually better for them. There was so much misinformation thrown around - that it would scan all of your photos and files as soon as they were created and then instantly report to the police if you took a photo of your infant in the bath, for example, or that it would be used by governments to identify people who have memes saved that they don’t like, which is absurd because that’s not how the CSAM databases work.
Apples proposed CSAM scanning was literally the best for privacy in the entire industry, and people created such an outrage over it that they basically went “oh well, we’ll just do what everyone else is doing which is far more insecure and worse for privacy” and everyone congratulated themselves lol
