[Godel_unicode]

Apple knew about a huge compromise of their users devices. Despite all of their marketing material talking about how much they value customer security and privacy, they made a business decision to not notify the affected users.

The lesson here is that you cannot rely on Apple to act in your interest if they think doing so will hurt them. Note that they aren't special here, any other company will probably act similarly, the difference is that Apple apologists would have you believe they, ahem, think differently.

[jsjohnst]

> Apple knew about a huge compromise of their users devices. Despite all of their marketing material talking about how much they value customer security and privacy, they made a business decision to not notify the affected users.

Important thing to keep in mind is that the emails in the article were from 2015, not 2021. Apple was not marketing privacy as heavily back then as they do now. Not trying to justify their action back then at all, as I firmly believe they should’ve notified users, but context matters imho.

[Godel_unicode]

“I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.”

Steve Jobs

All Things Digital Conference, 2010

[jsjohnst]

> Apple was not marketing privacy as heavily back then as they do now.

Notice I didn’t say they weren’t pushing privacy at all, I said not as heavily.

[Godel_unicode]

I read what you said, I just think you're quite wrong. This (2012) was when they were first having to do damage control for Siri being so awful, and they had the whole series of ads on prime time TV talking about how it was private.

Apple has had privacy and security as a core part of their marketing since forever. They also had a whole set of ads and comments in keynotes about how secure and privacy focused OSX was, taking shots at Windows.

[jsjohnst]

> Apple has had privacy and security as a core part of their marketing since forever. They also had a whole set of ads and comments in keynotes about how secure and privacy focused OSX was

I went back and skimmed through the past decade of Apple commercials, keynotes, and interviews by execs. After doing so I stand behind my point that privacy was not marketed the same pre 2017ish as it was after that. Yes, you’d see mentions here and they, but not until around 2017 did it become center stage and the apparent lens through how everything is viewed.

This is a very subjective thing though, so how about we disagree and commit?

[temp667]

Do android handset makers do these notifications? I mean - it's very likely that a LOT of chinese apps in particular (which these were) may have security holes, including ones that are there for govt purposes.

Did the directly affected companies do the notifications?

I thought Apple had sort of a separate setup in china (data center etc) to mitigate some of the issues there impacting the rest of their user base.