[growse]

> This is true, but it's also potentially worthwhile to consider that Apple has positioned themselves as a hardware company (i.e. the majority of their money is based on selling units of hardware), whereas their main competitor here (Google) is an ad company (i.e. the majority of their money comes from selling their users' data). Apple has chosen to highlight their commitment to privacy partially because they feel it helps their market position, whereas for Google, it would hurt it.

But this is all just marketing, whereas the reality is that Apple could also be hoovering up location data and you may never know.

You may have good reasons to trust Apple more than Google, which is great. Others may reverse that position of trust (perhaps they had their iCloud account hacked into and photographs leaked on the internet).

[horsecaptin]

"But this is all just marketing, whereas the reality is that Apple could also be hoovering up location data and you may never know."

It isn't just marketing. This is how the alignment of incentives works. A company's incentives are aligned with the people who pay them. Apple's are aligned with those that buy phones. Google and Facebook's are aligned with those that buy ads.

[slaman]

The parent argument is that without transparency it's difficult to actually know.

Apple's true incentive is to provide value for their shareholders.

If they can improve the value provided to shareholders by hoovering up information while also maintaining consumer confidence and sales then why would they not?

I think that Apple's incentives are better aligned with my desires for privacy, but it's only an assumption.

[sjwright]

> why would they not?

Because this sort of thing inevitably leaks? Apple has a formula that demonstrably works, a formula that everyone can directly observe making them an utterly stupid amount of money. It would be the height of stupidity to risk their unparalleled monetary successes to pursue a few dirty little crumbs.

[aoeusnth1]

Exactly - especially when you are employing privacy-conscious developers, it would be nearly impossible to keep it contained. Someone would leak it to the EFF. It's better business strategy for Apple to not defect.

[mikehotel]

Off topic

Saiya-jin, your comments all appear to be flagged and dead. You may want to contact a mod about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=saiya-jin

[saiya-jin]

Guys, this is all just plain old wishful thinking. Neither you, nor me, nor most people here have any real clue what decisions are being done behind closed doors of Apple, or other companies. All the high profile cases are mostly PR-oriented, see how PRISM was handled (not that they had any choice, but it is what it is).

Don't attach these emotions where they are not appropriate. Apple is a for-profit company. If they will be pressed hard by US government behind closed doors, they will bulge and you won't know about it, why should you (maybe in 10 years as part of some leak). If they will decide to change their strategy, they will. They have 0 moral issues hiding gazillions of cash offshore from IRS. Just like any other company out there.

Simple fact is, most people don't care about security. I work in IT, and I have numerous friends with iPhones, but exactly 0 of them cares about extra potential security when choosing phones, most have no clue about these issues. Regular people choose Apple because of Apple and how things look and feel, and how they are perceived among others as a status indicator.

[sjwright]

I think you massively overestimate the power of the US government. What would they do if Apple said no? Shut them down? Put Tim Cook in jail? Never going to happen. That perception of power might exist against mere civilians, but not against the big multinationals.

Apple has engineered their products to be unbreakable by Apple. That says a lot about their desire to cooperate!

Apple's billions held internationally aren't hidden, everyone knows where it is. And it was never money destined to be "on-shore" in the first place – it's profits from retail sales which occurred in Europe and elsewhere. Their offices in Ireland have the Apple logo on them and they're one of Ireland's largest taxpayers. Everything they do is on the public record. That money wasn't expatriated from the USA, the IRS isn't owed any of it.

[blibble]

outside of the nerds, how much of a percentage of apple users would switch if it did come out they had been doing this?

it's going to be less than 1%

... and where are they going to go?

[sjwright]

I think it would have much greater repercussions over time, eliminating one of the few concrete advantages of Apple products. But for now let's assume it only lost them a tiny share, perhaps one percent. Even that is a massive fortune compared to the money Apple could possibly make selling a bit of marketing data under the table.

[odammit]

I’m a nerd and I wouldn’t switch.

I’d be pissed for an hour but at the end of the day my phone, laptop, watch, TV and car all syncing my music and crap with no effort is too appealing to scoff at.

Hell if I found out they had a meat locker of dead kittens hidden in the basement of 1 Infinite Loop Id probably stay loyal.

[rayiner]

It would be a ballsy play of limited utility. For one, you're talking about Apple risking epic legal liability if they got caught. For the other, they'd be doing so for limited upside. They can only sell ads on the premise that they don't have all this inside information on their users.

[skewart]

> It isn't just marketing.

What makes you so confident? How do you know Apple thinks of itself as a hardware company whose incentives are aligned with those that buy phones? Their marketing certainly has made a lot of people think that, but, well that's just marketing.

Apple hasn't exactly always stuck with one identity. In 2007 one could have easily said that Apple is "a computer company" and not "a phone company" like Nokia.

Ultimately though, Google and Apple are incentivize to collect data for a lot more reasons than just selling ads. A lot of software functionality on phones benefits from rich user data. Apple may well be collecting data to drive better software experiences, and how much of that data they'll keep in-house vs sharing with third-parties is anybody's guess.

Even if you only consider advertising and hardware in simple terms, Apple is very directly incentivize to advertise new iPhones to current iPhone users. They want you to crave new models as soon as they come out, and to think your current model is kind of lame and old. Why wouldn't they be tempted to leverage user data to do that?

Finally, the vast majority of iPhone users probably aren't so sensitive to data security (the market of people who are is pretty small). So I doubt Apple cares that much about their perception among security-conscious people.

[davohmy]

"A company's incentives are aligned with the people who pay them"

That sounds great but it can not be further from the truth. So are you saying that Comcast and the telcos of the world incentives are aligned with their users?

[omnius19]

Telcos in the US have localized monopolies. Their customers are a captive audience. The incentive in that situation is for the telcos to wring as much money out of its customers as possible since they have nowhere else to go. Apple is very far from a monopoly. It sells in highly competitive markets and as such, is incentivized to appeal to its customers so that those customers do not choose another option for their hardware purchases.

[davohmy]

Ok, the example still holds where they do not have monopolies but let's move to a better example. Gaming. Highly competitive market.

You buy a game, do you think that it means that the game producer has your best interest at hearth? Apple is filthy rich not because they have users as top priority, but because the extract as much as they can from them. They have a very clear lock-in policy where they try to avoid their users moving to other platforms if they wish so (iMessage anyone). Is that really in their users interest?

[ehsankia]

You missed the point.

> Apple's are aligned with those that buy phones.

For all we know, that's what they want you to believe. The fact that you are so certain this is how they are incentivized could just mean that they did a fantastic job at marketing and making their users believe this image of themselves they've worked on.

[maigret]

But do you have counter examples? Because here, we see one more from Google, while Apple has had a much better track record so far that confirms this view that they are walking the talk, too.

[ex3ndr]

I feel that people mostly don't care to check the correctness of Apple's claims. Yesterday i asked a question about security (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15751571) and no one replied.

[icebraining]

A submission without replies doesn't necessarily mean nobody cares. Some links get submitted and receive zero comments, then a week later it gets submitted again and receives dozens or hundreds. It's a crapshoot.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> But this is all just marketing

Apple has a very strict internal culture of protecting user privacy.

[murjinsee]

...and yet they comply with ~80% of government requests for user data?

At the end of the day, they still have a way to break their own encryption; they just don't want to set a legal precedent or create tools to allow a third-party to have unfettered access.

Everything they say in public releases is just, "face". It's better than the Facebook or AT&T models of charging for access as a subscription service, but nonetheless I do not believe them when they claim their hardware is opaque to themselves.

Here is a link to their privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...

It states that they comply with requests by the government for user data, and informs the user unless gagged.

They received over 5000 NSL's in 6 months last year, which seems kind of dumb if they're not handing over data.

I, for one, do not believe that their "secure enclave" is truly secure, that they have no backdoor.

[marcosdumay]

And you know that exactly how?

Or, maybe more relevant, how do I get to know that?

[MaysonL]

Talk and listen to Apple and ex-Apple people.

[pbhjpbhj]

That's not scalable to the entire market of people wanting mobile devices, in case you didn't realise.

The question the GP was almost certainly asking was "how can the public confirm that security of their data is high on the agenda of Apple (and by extension any company), what systems are in place". Without third-party review of open systems and practices I can't see it being possible.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Be lucky in who you end up friends with.

[JustSomeNobody]

If Apple really is Hoovering up all our data, we'd hear about it. A disgruntled employee would tell all after they got fired or left.

[zingmars]

That's assuming if there is an disgruntled employee with knowledge of this happening and if there is, that there isn't an NDA good enough to make him or her to think twice about leaking anything should they leave on bad terms. That's a large if to place your hopes on.