[LegionMammal978]

My point is that while the sums might be "not real money", the costs of stiffing researchers is even moreso "not real money", so that it makes sense on the margin to do it, whenever the situation isn't incredibly clear-cut.

After all, it's not like Apple goes around handing out free iPhones on the street, even though a few thousand units are similarly "not real money". Businesses care about small effects on the margin.

[tptacek]

No, I don't think this logic holds, at all.

[LegionMammal978]

Which part does not follow? Even supposing that the members of Apple's bug bounty team are all well-meaning, but that the program itself is chronically mismanaged, one might conjecture that Apple is disincentivized from investing in making the program better-managed.

[tptacek]

I'm not deriving this axiomatically. The bounty programs I'm familiar with incentivize their teams to grant more bounties. I don't have recent specific knowledge of how Apple's program works. Obviously, Apple is more fussy than other programs! They want very specific things. But a just-so story that posits Apple's bounty incentives are just wildly different than the rest of the industry isn't going to get you and I anywhere. It's fine that we disagree. I do not believe Apple ruthlessly denies bounty payouts, and further think that claims they do are pretty wild.

(I have no opinions in either direction about whether Apple is denying bounty payments because of difficulties operating the program!)

[LegionMammal978]

Perhaps I've been somewhat too harsh: I don't see any particular 'ruthlessness' in Apple's actions. But I do think that its program, as well as many other bug bounty programs, can easily end up more byzantine in their rules than they'd otherwise be, since there's not much incentive counteracting such fussiness.

After all, one might easily imagine a forgiving rule of "we'll pay some amount of money (whether large or small) for any security issue we actively fix based on the information in the report", and yet Apple seemingly chooses to be more fussy than that in this case, unless they're just being extremely slow. I just don't see any way to square such apparent fussiness with your experience of bug bounty programs leaning toward paying out more.