[TreetopPlace]

"AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`'

Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.

[harry8]

> "I trust Apple..."

I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing.

The even more terrible part is I'm sure it's common. And so via network externalities the rest of us who do NOT trust any of these companies on the basis that all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways, will get locked into this lunacy. I now can't deal with the government without a smartphone controlled by either google or apple. No other choice. Because this utter insanity isn't being loudly called out, spat upon, and generally treated with the withering contempt that these companies have so richly and roundly earned this decision is being made for all society by the most naive among us.

[derefr]

I don't think the GP meant "trust" as in "I think Apple has my best interests at heart."

Rather, I think they meant "trust" as in "Apple is observably predictable and rational in how they work toward their own self-interest, rarely doing things for stupid reasons. And they have chosen to center their business on a long-term revenue strategy involving selling high-margin short-lifetime hardware — a strategy that only continues to work because of an extremely high level of brand-image they've built up; and which would be ruined instantly if they broke any of the fundamental brand promises they make. These two factors together mean that Apple have every reason to be incentivized to only say things if they're going to mean them and follow through on them."

There's also the much simpler kind of "trust" in the sense of "I trust them because they don't put me in situations where I need to trust them. They actively recuse themselves from opportunities to steal my data, designing architectures to not have places where that can happen." (Of course, the ideal version of this kind of trust would be a fully-open-source-hardware-and-software, work-in-the-open, signed-public-supply-chain-ledger kind of company. You don't get that from Apple, nor from any other bigcorp. Apple's software is proprietary... but at least it's in your hand where you can reverse-engineer it! Google's software is off in a cloud somewhere where nobody can audit changes to it.)

[rekoil]

For me it's more "I think Apples business interests more closely align with my wishes as a customer" as opposed to any other megacorp.

[WorldMaker]

At the heart of it: I feel like I'm Apple's customer in a way that I never feel like Google's customer (in everything they do it always seems like their real customers are Ad Buyers, even when you are ostensibly paying for services). (And Microsoft is in the middle and all over the map where some divisions treat you like a customer and others don't depending on the prevailing winds and the phase of the moon.)

[dfxm12]

What leads you to feel this way?

They are anti right to repair & they have their walled garden on their mobile devices. Their vertically integrated model also leads to unusually high prices. This website in particular would also directly feel the pain of Apple killing apps to implement themselves later, the greedy apple store cut and also not allowing use of hardware features that Apples themselves can use. Consumers feel this indirectly (higher prices, less competition).

Also, don't get it twisted, Apple is still collecting all of your data, even if you ask them not to [0].

0 - https://mashable.com/article/apple-data-privacy-collection-l...

[WorldMaker]

There's absolutely several axes in play here. You have very different concerns than I do, and that's valid.

Their vertically integrated model leads to very good customer service. I don't pay extra for Apple Care and I still get treated like an adult if I show up to an Apple Store with some need.

Even when Apple makes a mistake and collects more data than they should, I don't expect that data to influence ads that I see or to be sold to the highest bidder. (As a developer myself, I find that I can be quite lenient on app internal telemetry.) I can also see that ad review is barely a small side hustle to them in their Quaterly Reports and I can also see that most of their ad revenue is from untargeted campaigns. (Microsoft is a bigger ad company than Apple. Google is an ad company deep into its DNA at this point with everything else a side hustle.)

There is a beauty to a well maintained walled garden. Royalty invested a lot of money into walled gardens and Apple maybe doesn't treat you exactly like royalty, but there's a lot of similar respect/dignity there in their treatment of customers, even if they want you to trust them not to touch the flowers or dig below the walls too much. They want you to have a good time. They want their garden to be like a Disney World, safer than the real world.

You may not appreciate those sorts of comforts and that's fine. Plenty of people prefer the beauty and comfort of a walled garden than the free-for-all of a public park (or the squatter's rights of an abandoned amusement park if you don't mind playing unpaid mechanic more often than not). There's a lot of subjective axes to evaluate all of this on.

[rekoil]

Yeah that's pretty much how I feel as well.

[Octoth0rpe]

> high-margin short-lifetime hardware

I don't think this applies to their watch or tablet business where the limiting factor on lifetime in the market is security/os updates. Most alternatives in that space have significantly worse support cycles.

This used to be true of their phones as well, but the android market seems to be catching up in ways that tablets/wearables have not (see google's 7 year commitment for pixels).

Not sure if it applies to general purpose. Certainly there are non mac computers that we can throw linux on and use for 10+ years and there are examples of apple laptops getting cut off earlier than I'd like (RIP my beloved 12" macbook), but there are often some pretty serious tradeoffs to machines older than 7 years anyway. Also, I'm not sure if apple's strategy re: support lifecycles on products after the AS migration have shifted. It wouldn't surprise me if the first gen m1 products get 10 years of security updates.

[caycep]

it's not that I blindly trust apple; it's more that they're the one FAANG company where I am the actual customer and their incentives align/depend on keeping me happy. Google/MS could care less how I feel; and I am well aware that I am most certainly not their customer.

[NBJack]

> it's more that they're the one FAANG company where I am the actual customer and their incentives align/depend on keeping me happier

Do they though? Battery performance that 'lies' to you intentionally, planned obsolescence, locked in ecosystems, overtly undercutting the alternatives, marketing that hypes up rather bland features...I admit I don't see your point.

Apple, if anything, seem about as user hostile as Microsoft is these days.

[audunw]

> Battery performance that 'lies' to you intentionally, planned obsolescence ...

Everything is relative. Apple generally supports their devices with OS updates for longer than most Android phone makers. Their incentives here are well aligned: they get a decent profit from Apple Store no matter how long you use their phone.

I think a lot of the reporting on Apples actions is very click-baity and lack nuance. Take the case when Apple throttled CPU performance of their phones when the battery got old and degraded. It was reported as a case of planned obsolescence, but it was in fact the exact opposite: by limiting the power consumption of the CPU they avoided unexpected phone shutdown due to battery voltage going too low during bursts of high power consumption. A phone that randomly shuts down is borderline use-less. A phone that is slower can at least be used for a while longer. Apple didn't have to do this. They would have spent less R&D money, and had a much lower chance of bad PR backlash, if they just simply did nothing. Yet they did something to keep old phones useful for longer.

> locked in ecosystems

That's a fine balance. Creating a good ecosystem is part of what makes Apple so user friendly. And it's a lot harder to create open ecosystems than having closed ones. Especially when you factor in security and reliability. If Apple diverted resources to making their ecosystems more open I think their ecosystem integration would have been significantly worse, which would have made them lose the thing most users considers Apples primary advantage.

Apple is a mixed bag. They were one of the first to go all-in on USB-C. Sometimes they push aggressively for new open standards that improve user experience. Yet they held on to Lightning for far too long on their phones. But here you get back to the planned obsolescence factor: there's a HUGE amount of perfectly fine Lightning accessories out there that people/companies are using with iPhones. If they killed Lightning too fast I can guarantee you they would have gotten a lot of hate from people who couldn't use their Lightning accessory anymore. With laptops that wasn't a big issue. Adapters are significantly less convenient to use with phone accessories.

[skydhash]

Apple is tinker-hostile, but they’re great at getting-things-done for the majority of people. It’s frustrating when you have the knowledge to build custom workflows, but the happy path and the guardrails work great for many.

Microsoft have no consistency and Google wants you to pray at the altar of advertising.

[AnAfrican]

Shouldn't Microsoft be somewhere between Google and Apple ? After all, they do rely on you buying their software in a way Google does not.

[realfeel78]

Who do you think is Netflix's customer if not you?

[tl]

> I'm actually a little gobsmacked anyone on this forum can type those words without physically convulsing.

Apple tells a pretty compelling lie here. Rather than execute logic on a server whose behavior can change moment to moment, it executes on a device you "own" with a "knowable" version of its software. And you can absolutely determine no network traffic occurs during the execution of the features from things announced this week and going back a decade.

The part that Apple also uploads your personal information to their servers on separate intervals both powering their internal analytics and providing training data is also known, and for the most part, completely lost on people.

[ducadveritatem]

Are you claiming Apple uses personal user data (e.g someone’s photos or texts) as training data for their server-side models? That’s a massive claim and there are some journalists you should definitely shoot a message to on signal if you have proof of that and aren’t just blowing smoke.

[tl]

Apple's claim (per public statements) is:

- They upload your data to their servers. This is a requirement of iCloud and several non-iCloud systems like Maps.

- Where analytics is concerned, data is anonymized. They give examples of how they do this like by adding noise to the start and end of map routes.

- Where training is concerned, data is limited to purchased data (photos) and opted-in parties (health research).

My point is that Apple's code executing on device can be verified to execute on device. That concept does not require trust. Where servers are involved and Apple does admit their use in some cases, you trust them (as much as you trust Google) their statements are both perfectly true and ageless. Apple transitions seamlessly between two true concepts with wildly different implications.

[wraptile]

Apple's marketing and branding is truly impressive when even Hackernews crowd, who'd you assume are very tech savvy, are eating it up all of the propaganda.

[kstrauser]

“Wow, so many of these people neck deep into tech, privacy, and law disagree with me. It must be because they’re all suckers.”

[wraptile]

Despite your snark - you'll never win an argument where trusting a for profit corporation is some sort of win over transparent secure system. Yes Apple might be better of the lesser evils but is this really where us as a privileged class of people who actually understand all this give up and give in? This is sad.

[kstrauser]

You’ll also never win an argument when assuming that the people you disagree with haven’t thought this through and come up with a different conclusion. The snark is from the implication that we’re either clueless or blind to it. The more likely explanation is that we have different priorities, and that we’re viewing the question from a different angle. That doesn’t make us ignorant or unprincipled, any more than you disagreeing with me makes you naive or unserious.

We have different ideas. That’s all. There’s no need to look down on each other for it.

[umanwizard]

There’s not really any transparent secure system that competes with Apple.

[vundercind]

Yeah, at this point, for me, it’s “use Apple stuff” or “barely use computers in my personal life”. I did the Linux and (later) Android tinkering thing for a good long while, and I’m over it. Losing all the features and automation and integration I get with no time lost, for a bunch of time consuming and janky DIY that still wouldn’t get me all of it, isn’t something I’ll do these days. I’d just avoid computers.

[fsflover]

Define "competes". Sent from my GNU/Linux phone Librem 5.

[dingnuts]

Uh, friend, this is still just an internet technology enthusiast forum. Popular opinion here is equally as reliable as Reddit. If you are taking hn upvotes as some kind of expert input, you're in for a rough time.

[kstrauser]

No argument from me. I was replying to someone who couldn't believe the readers here, "who'd you assume are very tech savvy", didn't agree with their opinions.

[jrm4]

"Wow, so many of these people disagree with me, it might be because they have a huge dangerous blind spot because of a lack of knowledge and/or experience and/or have trouble seeing things from the outside"

...is a thing I experience on a regular basis (and that I only really gained confidence in once I actually saw the mistakes cause problems, e.g. password managers)

[adrian_b]

I would give multiple upvotes to this, were it possible.

I do not have either Google or Apple accounts and I do not intend to ever open such accounts (despite owning some Android smartphones and having owned Apple laptops).

Because of this, I am frequently harassed by various companies or agencies, which change their interaction metods into smartphone apps and then deprecate the alternatives.

Moreover, I actually would be willing to install such apps, but only if there would be some means to download them, but most of them insist on providing the app only in the official store, from which I cannot install it, because I have no Google account.

I have been forced to close my accounts in one of the banks that I use, because after using their online banking system in the browser for more than a decade, including from my smartphone, they have decided to have a custom app.

In the beginning that did not matter, but then they have terminated their Web server for online banking and they have refused to provide directly their app, leaving the Google store as the only source of it.

I have been too busy to try to fight this legally, but I cannot believe that their methods do not break any law. I am not an US citizen, I live in the European Union, and when an European bank (a Societe Generale subsidiary) refuses to provide its services to anyone who does not enter in a contractual relationship with a foreign US company, such discrimination cannot be legal.

[LamaOfRuin]

I sympathize with the plight, as I have also occasionally tried to fight this fight.

However, to quibble with your last analysis, you're almost certainly entering an agreement with the EU registered legal entity of a multinational company, and you almost certainly already had to do that to obtain the hardware, run the OS, use the browser, etc. The degree to which any of those contracts are enforceable is another matter.

[adrian_b]

Even if Google were treated as a local company, that does not change anything.

I find unbelievable that a bank has the arrogance of conditioning their services on whether their customers accept to do business or not with some third party.

I see no difference between the condition of having a Google account and for instance a condition that I should buy my car from Audi or from any other designated company, instead of from wherever I want. It is none of my bank's business what products or services I choose to buy or use (outside of special circumstances like when receiving bank credits).

[PaulRobinson]

Could you provide an alternative model where you get what you want, that is economically viable for vendors and manufacturers to invest in, and that does not require me to teach my parents how to sysadmin their phones to keep them safe?

I trust Apple more than I trust Google to not share my data with a large group of corporate entities who want to sell me things I do not wish to buy.

I believe both - and if required, organizations like Mozilla, Ubuntu, Redhat/Oracle, whoever - to comply with law enforcement requests made of them to hand over any data relating to me that they might hold. I'm OK with that. I think Apple has less of that data than Google, and works actively to have less of it. Google works actively to increase the amount of data they have about me.

I think even if you had a functional device using entirely open software, that any organisation you share that data with or use to communicate with using that device - including cloud service providers, network providers, and so on - would also comply with law enforcement.

"Ah!", you say, "But I get to choose which crypto to use! I know it won't have backdoors!". To which I will reply you are unlikely to have read and truly understood the source code to the crypto software you're using, and that such software is regularly shown to have security issues. It's just not true that open source means that all bugs become shallow, and the "many eyes" you're hoping for to surface these issues are likely employed at, err, Apple, Google, Redhat, Ubuntu, Mozilla...

I look at the landscape and I conclude that true open source environments have a ton of issues, Google/Android have far more (for my taste), and that I am more confident in Apple than I am in either myself (even as an experienced tech expert), or Google, or Microsoft, to keep my data private to me to the greatest extent legally permissible.

Do I think "legally permissible" should be extended? Sure. Do I wish a multi-billionaire would throw 50% of the net worth at making open source compete on the same level? Yeah, cool. Do I think any of that is realistic in the next 5 years? No. So, I make my bets accordingly, eyes wide open, balancing the risks...

[umanwizard]

Do you have any examples of Apple being untrustworthy to back up your rather extreme reaction?

[adrian_b]

You should remember that in December 2023 it was revealed that the "Apple Silicon" CPUs have some undocumented testing features, which have unbelievably remained enabled in the Apple devices for many years until being notified by the bug finders, instead of being disabled at the end of production.

Using the undocumented but accessible control registers, all the memory protections of the Apple devices could be bypassed. Using this hardware backdoor, together with some software bugs in the Apple system libraries and applications, for many years, until the end of 2023, it has been possible to remotely take complete control of any iPhone, with access to its storage and control of the camera and microphone, in such a way that it was almost impossible for the owner to discover this (the backdoor bugs have been discovered only as a consequence of analyzing some suspicious Internet traffic of some iPhones that were monitored by external firewalls).

It is hard to explain such a trivial security error as not disabling a testing backdoor after production, for a company that has claimed publicly for so long that they take the security of their customers very seriously and that has provided a lot of security theater features, like a separate undocumented security processor, while failing to observe the most elementary security rules.

It is possible that the backdoor was intentional, either inserted with the knowledge of the management at the request of some TLA, or by a rogue Apple employee who was a mole of such a TLA, but these alternative explanations are even worse for Apple than the explanation based on negligence.

[saagarjha]

I don't think this demonstrates untrustworthiness.

[talldayo]

Sure. Next you'll say that POPCOUNT and the Intel Management Engine are actually perfectly trustworthy too.

[neonsunset]

Wait, what's wrong with BMI1 instructions?

[mixmastamyk]

Forgot the "screeching minority" who values privacy quote already?

https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...

[sho]

> all of them, time and again, have shown themselves to be totally untrustworthy in all possible ways

Sorry, but this seems like a very vague claim to me. Can you specifically point out a time where Apple proved itself untrustworthy in a way that impacts personal privacy?

When Apple says they treat my data in a specific way, then yes I do trust them. This promise is pretty central to my usage of them as a company. I'd change my mind if there was evidence to suggest they're lying, or have betrayed that trust, but I haven't seen any, and your post doesn't provide any either.

[throwaway0223]

It depends on what you'd consider "untrustworthy", but some (myself included) feel it's hypocritical for Apple to position itself as a privacy conscious choice, and use its marketing / PR machine to give the impression it only makes money on devices/subscriptions, when they're silently managing an ads-funded cash cow, with billions of dollars that go directly to the bottom line, as pure profit.

Here's a few pointers, to get you up to speed [1-5]. Of course there's nothing wrong with monetizing their own user base and selling ads based on their 1PD (or, in the case of Safari, monetizing the search engine placement). But I find it ironic that they make a ton of money by selling ads based on the exact same practices they demonize others for -- user behavior, contextual, location, profile.

[1] https://searchads.apple.com/

[2] Apple’s expanding ad ambitions: A closer look at its journey toward a comprehensive ad tech stack - https://digiday.com/media-buying/apples-expanding-ad-ambitio...

[3] Apple’s Ad Network Is The Biggest Beneficiary Of Apple’s New Marketing Rules: Report -- https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/10/19/apples-...

[4] Apple Privacy Suits Claim App Changes Were Guise to Boost Ad Revenue - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/app...

[5] Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims - https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company

[dwaite]

> they're silently managing an ads-funded cash cow, with billions of dollars that go directly to the bottom line, as pure profit

Advertising isn't anti-privacy. Apple's fight was with tracking by third parties without user knowledge or consent. That is independent of, but often used for, advertising purposes.

This is different from say Google determining ads on Youtube based on what you are watching on Youtube.com, and from Amazon or Apple promoting products based on your product searches solely within their respective stores.

[codedokode]

> Advertising isn't anti-privacy.

Advertising works much better when there is no privacy.

[WorldMaker]

Tracking-based Ad targeting is blip in the history of advertising and goes against previous decades of "common sense" in advertising that the best ads cast the widest net and catch the eye of people you (and they) don't even know are potential targets.

I hope this current fad dies and people return to that older marketing "common sense". Over-targeting is bad for consumers and bad for advertisers, the only people truly benefiting seem to be Google and Meta.

[nozzlegear]

Your truism doesn’t refute their point.

[fragmede]

The fact that Advanced Data Protection on iCloud wasn't forced is sus.

[ZaoLahma]

As someone who has to help my father with his personal tech as his mental health deteriorates (several brain tumors), I'm thrilled every time I find something that ISN'T locked down behind pin codes, passwords or other authentication methods that he no longer remembers or can communicate.

His current state really has made me think about my own tech, about what should be locked down and what really should not be - things that we lock down out of habit (or by force) rather than out of necessity.

[dclowd9901]

Given the rate at which the elderly find themselves swindled out of money due to scams, hacks or any other method of invasion, I really don’t think loosening controls makes the most sense.

Might be interesting if companies offered the ability for someone to be a “steward” over another when it came to sensitive choices (like allowing new logins, sending money, etc). Of course that itself is a minefield of issues with family members themselves taking advantage of their elderly members. But maybe power of attorney would have to be granted?

[ZaoLahma]

What I hinted at was more granularity in how we treat different types of data, or other accesses, in response to the idea of being forced to turn on "Advanced Data Protection on iCloud".

Rather than putting all of our personal data and accesses under a thick virtual fire blanket, perhaps it is perfectly fine if some of it isn't protected at all, or is protected in ways that could be easily circumvented with just a tiny bit of finagling.

This is now how I'm approaching my own digital foot print, that some not secret things are nowadays wide open, unencrypted and you just need to know where to look to access all of it.

[seec]

Yeah, the thing about "security" is that there is a lot more chance that it will come to bite you in the ass later down the road than being successful (actually prevent an issue). I have some funny stories about unrecoverable drives because of forgotten encryption keys.

For most people the only security they need is actually access to their money, everything else is mostly irrelevant, nobody really cares about weird habits or whatever.

[sho]

Not when you understand the tradeoffs being made. If you enable Advanced Data Protection and lose or forget your password, Apple cannot help you recover it. It makes sense that it's opt-in and users make a conscious choice to make that trade-off.

[matwood]

Have you ever done tech support?

[suneater921]

Yeah, you’re right. Apple’s approach to privacy is like one of those fairytale genies. On paper, and in many technical aspects, class-leading, but useless because anyone powerful and/or determined enough to hurt you will be able to use the backdoors that they willingly provide.

End to end encryption? Sure, but we’re sending your location and metadata in unencrypted packets.

Don’t want governments to surveil your images? Sure, they can’t see the images - but they’ll send us hashes of illegal images, and we’ll turn your images into hashes, check them against each other, and report you to them if we find enough.

Apple essentially sells unbreakable locked doors while being very careful to keep a few windows open. They are a key PRISM member and have obligations under U.S. law that they will fulfil. Encryption backdoors aren’t needed when the systems that they work within can be designed to provide backdoors.

I fully expect that Apple Intelligence will have similar system defects that won’t be covered properly, and will go forgotten until some dissident gets killed and we wonder why.

For a look at their PR finesse in tricking media, see this, over the CSAM fiasco that has been resolved, in Apple’s favour.

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n...

[realfeel78]

> Sure, they can’t see the images - but they’ll send us hashes of illegal images, and we’ll turn your images into hashes, check them against each other, and report you to them if we find enough.

> I fully expect that Apple Intelligence will have similar system defects

Being able to scan devices for CSAM at scale is a "defect" to you?

[parl_match]

Yes, it is a defect. For many reasons

- it's anti-user: a device spying on you and reporting back to a centralized server is a bad look

- it's a slippery slope: talking about releasing this caused them to get requests from governments to consider including "dissident" information

- it's prone to abuse: within days, the hashing mechanism they were proposing was reverse engineered and false positives were embedded in innocent images

- it assumes guilt across the population: what happened to innocent by default?

and yes, csam is a huge problem. And btw, apple DOES currently scan for it- if you share an album (and thus decrypt it), it is scanned for CSAM.

[ladzoppelin]

Yeah but Google and MS have the same problems.. What your talking about is the reality of using a computer connected to the internet since 2003.

[seec]

But they don't bullshit about it as much and their offerings are much cheaper and it's easier to not have to pay as much (either with data or money).

There is just a general hypocrisy about Apple that is hilarious.

[NBJack]

This is true, but your examples aren't directly trying to pretend they are the better alternatives for that. Apple is doing its best to paint itself as some golden company when reality dictates they are no better (if honestly worse in some categories).

[jajko]

Don't expect balanced objective opinions on Apple on HN, that was never ever the case. Some of it are tech enthusiasts, some are maybe employees or investors, some is paid PR.

Nothing wrong there per se, its just good to realize it.

[dyauspitr]

What government needs you to have a smartphone from Apple or Google?

[jay_kyburz]

The Australian Government required you to have an app called MyGovID to do you business taxes and other administrative tasks. This app is only Apple or Android, there is no web interface.

[kolinko]

That’s crazy. Why no web interface? In Poland for taxes we have a web interface that is mobile and stationary, and for many other things it’s a choice between an app and web and paper.

[jay_kyburz]

The tax part is all web, it just mandatory 2 factor authentication to login that requires the app.

[kolinko]

Ahl. In our case, we have mobile app 2fa, but also an sms 2fa, and authentication through bank login - it’s quite neat that the government struck deal with a bunch of banks, and they serve as identity providers too.

[kolinko]

Not a requirement, but in Poland a ton of administration things can be done from a dedicated iphone/android app - including using your official ID. It is optional though, and you can alway do the same stuff (ID aside) from the web, or using paper and going places in person.

[nozzlegear]

> Because this utter insanity isn't being loudly called out, spat upon, and generally treated with the withering contempt that these companies have so richly and roundly earned this decision is being made for all society by the most naive among us.

Ah yes, blame the simple-minded plebes who foolishly cast their noses up at Windows Phone. If only Ballmer were still in charge, surely he'd have saved us from this horrible future of personal, privacy-respecting AI at the edge...

[cchance]

Have to agree, apple seems to put a really strong emphasis above all else on your shit is your shit and we don't want to see it.

[m463]

But this is not true. that's the thing.

Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time. ios gives you zero control (all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it)

Apple uses your data. you should be able to say no.

And as for your data, they do other things too, a different way. Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to icloud.

I've seem privacy minded parents say no, but then they get their kid an iphone and all of their stuff goes to icloud.

I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data icloud.

[dwaite]

> Apple is very intrusive. Macos phones home all the time.

The platform is heavily internet-integrated, and I would expect it to periodically hit Apple servers. There are a lot of people claiming to be security researchers reporting what Little Snitch told them. There are drastically fewer who would introspect packets and look for any gathered telemetry.

I really haven't seen evidence Apple is abusing their position here.

> Everything goes to icloud by default. I've gotten new devices and boom, it's uploading everything to iCloud.

You need to enable iCloud. You are prompted.

Also, a new device should have next to nothing to upload to iCloud, as its hard disk is still in the factory configuration.

> I think apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data iCloud

They have desktop backup. Maybe they should allow third party backup Apps on iPhone, although I suspect data would be encrypted and blinded to prevent abuses by third parties, and recovery would be challenging because today recovery is only possible on a known-state filesystem. The recovery aspect is what really has limited it to the handful of approaches implemented directly by Apple.

[sgarland]

A key difference is that Apple isn’t then selling the info it has on you to advertisers.

I don’t think any large tech company is morally good, but I trust Apple the most out of the big ones to not do anything nefarious with my info.

[cstejerean]

None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers. They allow advertisers to target people based on the data, but the data itself is never sold. And it would be dumb to sell it because selling targeted ads is a lot more valuable than selling data.

Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.

[wcfields]

> None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers.

First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.

I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.

On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.

I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.

[cstejerean]

> we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels

So you got aggregated analytics instead of data about individual users.

Meanwhile other companies are selling your name, phone number, address history, people you are affiliated with, detailed location history, etc.

Which one would you say is "selling user data"?

[tsunamifury]

They absolutely are. And they give it to governments upon request.

Their privacy stories are marketing first.

[itissid]

I don't think they sell it like Google or Samsung. For example Apple does not have a location intelligence team dedicated to driving revenue for store brands or targeting users that go there using precise geo location data.

Google and Samsung do.

[jhanschoo]

Give me a source that they are selling your data, not targeted ads.

[freetanga]

I _trust_ Google to attempt to do so, and fail sadly along the way…

They went from “Don’t be evil” to a cartoonish “Doctor Evil” character in a decade.

[dwaite]

> And they give it to governments upon request.

So in other words, "companies operating within a nation are expected to abide by the laws of that nation"?

Apple structures their systems to limit the data they can turn over by request, and documents what data they do turn over. What else do you believe they should be doing?

[tsunamifury]

Actually under US rule of law you don’t just turn over things upon request.

Much like every other tech company you test the request.

Apple never does.

[rootusrootus]

They are selling data to advertisers? I would like to know more about that.

[mgiampapa]

Google isn't. They are the advertising engine and sell to advertisers for reach, just like Facebook does.

I trust Apple about as far as I can throw them too. They are inherently anti-consumer rights everywhere in their ecosystem. The "Privacy" angle is just PR.

[jfoster]

Anyone who disagrees with you about this should buy a Mac and try not enabling iCloud. There's constant nags and as far as I could find, no way to turn them off.

[musicale]

1) Have you tried installing Linux? ;-)

2) I have booted macOS VMs without iCloud. I'm not sure of the nags though. I believe signing out of iCloud will prevent iCloud from contacting Apple.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/104958

[m463]

1) yes:)

2) that is entirely NOT true. You should install little snitch and see what happens even if you NEVER sign into icloud. note that the phone home contact is not immediate, it happens in the background at random intervals from random applications.

just some random services blocked by little snitch on a mac:

accountsd, adprivacyd, airportd, AMPLibraryAgent, appstoreagent, apsd, AssetCacheLocatorService.xpc, cloudd, com.apple.geod.xpc, com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service, commerce, configd, familycircled, mapspushd, nsurlsessiond, ocspd, rapportd, remindd, Safari, sntp, softwareupdated, Spotlight, sutdentd, syspolicyd, touristd, transparencyd, trustd, X11.bin

(never signed into an apple id)

[nativeit]

Tell me more about how dastardly it is that Safari communicates with Apple servers. Type it from your browser that doesn’t communicate directly with its developers.

[dyauspitr]

I’ve never used iCloud since it came out. I can’t think of a single nag. Where do you see it on your iPhone or Mac?

[jfoster]

There's several of them. The most annoying for me was getting intermittent notifications to sign in to iCloud.

There's also this one: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250727947

I eventually just gave in to stop the nags.

[Takennickname]

I have an iPad (not iPhone or Mac). If you don't set up Icloud, there's always an annoying bright red circle in settings that tells you to "finish setting up your iPad".

Doesn't have to be bright red, or even there at all.

[kstrauser]

Last time I had that on a laptop I was going to wipe soon afterward and didn’t want to fully set up, I clicked the “finish setting up” link and canceled out. Voila, red circle gone.

[dyauspitr]

Yes, that’s the only one I’ve seen. But it’s not much of a nag.

[musicale]

> all apps have internet access by default, and you cannot stop it

Technically you can by turning off wi-fi and disabling cellular data, bluetooth, location services, etc. for the app.

To your point though, wi-fi data should also be a per-app setting, and it is an annoying omission. macOS has outgoing firewalls, but iOS does not (though you could perhaps fake it with a VPN.)

[krrrh]

> Apple is very intrusive

> Apple uses your data.

> they do other things too, a different way

What specifically do you mean? Their frankly quite paranoid security and privacy white papers are pretty comprehensive and I don’t think they could afford to lie in those.

> Apple should allow a personal you-have-all-your-data iCloud

Advanced Data Protection[0] applies e2ee for basically everything, with the exception email, and doesn’t degrade the seamless multi-device experience at all. For most people this is the best privacy option by a long shot, and no other major platform can provide anything close.

They’ve hampered product experience for a long time because of their allergy against modelling their customers on the cloud. The advent of AI seems to have caught them a bit off guard but the integrated ecosystem and focus on on-device processing looks like it may pay off, and Siri won’t feel 5 years behind Google Assistant or Alexa.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102651

[FireBeyond]

> What specifically do you mean? Their frankly quite paranoid security and privacy white papers are pretty comprehensive and I don’t think they could afford to lie in those.

A couple of years ago Apple was busted when it was discovered that most Apple first-party apps weren't getting picked up by packet sniffer or firewalls on macOS.

Apple tried deflecting for a while before finally offering up the flimsy claim that it "was necessary to make updates easier". Which isn't a really good explanation when you're wondering why TextEdit.app needs a kernel network extension.

[kalleboo]

What actually happened was Apple removed support for kernel extensions that these firewall apps used.

The user-mode replacement APIs allowed by sandboxed apps had a whitelist for Apple's apps, so you couldn't install some App Store firewall app that would then disable the App Store and screw everything up.

After the outrage, in a point release a few months later, they silently emptied out the whitelist, resolving the issue.

They never issued any kind of statement.

[FireBeyond]

So their "fix", as described here, removed protection from "having the App Store disabled and everything screwed up"?

That makes no sense.

Even if it did, the app the would need protection is the App Store, not every single Apple app. In many cases, the fix for the worst case scenario would be "remove firewall app".

Also, given that TextEdit was not an AppStore app, for but one example, but a base image app.

> They never issued any kind of statement.

Shocking. I've had at least two MBPs affected by different issues that were later subject to recall, but no statement there. radar.apple.com may well be read by someone, but is largely considered a black hole.

[thomassmith65]

The lack of an iOS setting to deny specific apps network access is absurd. It doesn't feel like much of a privacy-focused platform when every day in my network logs I see hundreds of attempted connections from 'offline' iOS apps.

[parl_match]

For what it's worth, those platform investments are the difference between Apple being applauded for this, and Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.

[jeswin]

> I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI...

Depends on where you are. Apple will bend over backwards when profits are affected, as you can see in China.

Ironically, the only time a large company took a stand at the cost of profits was in 2010 when Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor. Google has changed since then, but that was the high watermark for corporates putting principles over profits. Apple, no.

[dwaite]

> Google pulled out of China over hacking and subsequently refused to censor

My impression is that they had little chance to survive in a Chinese market, competing with a severely limited product against state-sponsored search products while also being a victim of state-sponsored cyberattacks.

It was the morally correct decision, but I don't know if they were leaving any money on the table doing so. I suspect the Google of today would also decide not to shovel cash into an incinerator.

[bayindirh]

When enrolling physical security keys to my accounts, only Google's process requested extra, identifiable fields in my key, generating a warning in Firefox, which can anonymize these fields.

Google wants to track even my physical security key across sites to track me.

How can I trust their AI systems with my data?

[dwaite]

The attestation on (FIDO certified) security keys is a batch attestation, and meant to correspond to a a batch size of at least 100,000.

So they were effectively asking for the make and model.

There are non-certified authenticators which may have unfortunate behaviors here, such as having attestations containing a hardware serial number. Some browsers maintain a list and will simply block attestations from these authenticators. Some will prompt no matter what.

There is also a bit of an 'Open Web' philosophy at play here - websites often do not have a reason to make security decisions around the make and models of keys. Having an additional prompt in a user conversion path discourages asking for information they don't need, particularly information which could be used to give some users a worse experience and some vendors a strong 'first-mover' market advantage.

In fact, the motivator for asking for this attestation is often for self-service account management. If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone.

Many parties (including Google) seem to have moved to using an AAGUID lookup table to populate this screen in order to avoid the attestation prompt. It also winds up being more reliable, as software authenticators typically do not provide attestations today.

[bayindirh]

Both devices are Yubikey 5 series, and none of the other services asked for anything similar, or triggered any warnings.

Moreover, none of the service providers auto-named my keys with make/model, etc.

> If I have two entries for registered credentials, it is nice if I have some way to differentiate them, such as knowing one of them is a Yubico 5Ci while the other is an iPhone.

First, Google doesn't differentiate the security keys' name even if you allow for that data to be read, plus you can always rename your keys to anything you want, at any of the service providers I enrolled my keys, so it doesn't make sense.

Moreover, Firefox didn't warn me for any other services which I enrolled my keys, and none of them are small providers by any means.

So, it doesn't add up much.

[4m1rk]

Google is not trusted because it was an AI company and needed your data. Apple just joined the club.

[anileated]

Since Apple is building ChatGPT integration into its devices, it’s clear that Apple’s users’ data is going to be slurped by Microsoft via ClosedAI servers now.

It’s unlikely latency would permit them to proxy every request to fully mask end-user IPs (it’s unclear what “obscured” means), and they would probably include device identifiers and let Microsoft maintain your shadow profile if that could improve ChatGPT output (it may not require literally storing your every request, so denying that is weasel phrasing).

[kstrauser]

I’ve been browsing with Private Relay since the day it became available. What’s this intolerable latency you’re talking about?

[anileated]

Browsing is not the same as using a personal assistant.

First, it takes much less compute to serve a page than to run an LLM query. LLMs are slow even if you eliminate all network.

Second, your expectations when browsing are not the same as when using a personal assistant.

Right now even when I simply ask Siri to set a timer it takes more than a couple of seconds. Add an actual GPT in the mix and it’s laughable.

In any case, even with a private relay, Apple’s phrasing does not deny sending device identifiers and allowing ClosedAI/Microsoft to build your shadow profile (without storing requests verbatim).

[kstrauser]

Nope, you’re moving the goalposts. You were talking about the latency of making a network call. I pointed out that Apple’s current proxying architecture has low latency for web browsing, with orders of magnitude larger requests moving through it. We’re not going to bring GPT slowness into the mix because that’s not what we were discussing.

[anileated]

No, I meant the cumulative latency that increases with every hop. You can’t fool physics. Not proxying is just faster and in case of an already super-slow server these seconds matter to any UX designer worth their salt.