| Ok this is a little frustrating for me. Not because there aren't bad actors (there are, and LOTS of them, basically anything ad-supported.) But we're in a capitalist system, right? We want companies to compete on features that have value to users. And privacy is definitely a thing of value. And god help me, I never wanted to be an Apple apologist, they're a giant capitalist organization. But they're also the ONLY one that is attempting to compete on the basis of privacy. And so they have e2e encryption on iMessages, most of iCloud, are the only people doing meaningful things with homomorphic encryption and AI, etc. They recently, very publicly, turned off these features in the UK due to recent legislation. But if I look at what they're doing, and the audits they're admitting, and the political hits they're taking, and if I dismiss all that I'm supposed to be "candidly naive"? Do you want us to choose our platforms on the basis of privacy, or not? And I'm not just "trusting" Apple, I'm looking at their financial incentives. Which are focused around selling extremely overpriced, decent quality hardware. Not ad targeting. For me to believe that Apple is wantonly and deliberately harvesting my data would require that I believe they have an entire secondary advertising business that has remained completely under the radar. Again, fuck you for making me defend Apple. They have so many issues. But also if we just go pure nihilist and don't even allow companies to compete on the basis of proper security, what's left, unless we go offline entirely? |
What we want and what actually happens are two different things. In many cases there isn't a whole lot of competition. For example, Apple's only competitor for mobile OS is google.