[pornel]

This worries me beyond anti-competitive stuff.

If Tim Cook is willing to lie and cheat for extra revenue, I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments. Services revenue line must keep going up, and their ad business is a growth opportunity.

[satvikpendem]

> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments

This is a funny comment for me to read. Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization? They've had things like iAd, their services revenue has grown massively as hardware sales plateau, and they are nowhere near as "private" in certain countries either.

[xpe]

I agree, but I might phrase it a little bit differently. I recommend thinking about corporate stances as actions and interests, not moral intentions. Don’t expect a corporation to do things for moral reasons. Trust them only to the extent that their actions are in their self interest. To be fair, some organizations do have charters and interests that make them more palatable than others.

One takeaway to startups that hope to stand for something even after tremendous growth and leadership changes: you have to build governance and accountability structures into your organizational DNA if you truly want specific values to persist over the long run.

[Tarq0n]

Sadly the openAI debacle has undermined faith in those kinds of structures as well.

[Wobbles42]

This is probably a good thing -- faith in such structures was never justified.

Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.

Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.

[syndeo]

The end of that comment took me pretty quickly from "software applications?? nah" to "oh wow, y'know that's actually a pretty apt analogy"

[xpe]

Yes, OpenAI demonstrated one way not-for-profits can be commandeered. Altman appears to be quite astute at gaining power.

Every organizational design and structure has the potential to be subverted. Like cybersecurity, there are many tradeoffs to consider: continuity, adaptability, mission flexibility, and more. And they don’t exist in isolation. People are often going to seek influence and power one way or the other.

One more thing. Just because it is hard doesn’t mean we should work less hard on building organizations with durable values.

[amelius]

Therefore it's better to stay the hell away from companies who actively seek to take away your freedom.

[Wobbles42]

I don't think there are any companies that care one way or the other about taking away your freedom.

Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.

The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.

[xpe]

> Companies are revenue maximizers, period.

This explanatory model explains a lot of what companies do but not all. It is a useful first approximation for many firms.

Still, the conceit of modeling an organization as a rational individual only gets you so far. It works for certain levels of analysis, I will grant. But to build more detailed predictive models, more complexity is needed. For example, organizational inertia is a thing. One would be wise to factor in some mechanism for constrained rationality and/or “irrational” deviations. CEOs often move in herds, for example.

> The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

Theory, meet history. But more seriously, will you lay out what you mean by quickly? And what does market data show? Has this been studied empirically? (I’m aware that it is a theoretical consequence of some particular market theories — but I don’t think successful financial modelers would make that claim without getting much more specific.)

[amelius]

I've been running Linux on Intel/AMD boxes for decades without any such problems.

[syndeo]

Heard of the Intel Management Engine? https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...

Little doubt AMD has something similar.

[jimbokun]

Isn't that all of them if they could?

[PaulRobinson]

iAd is stated as being built differently to how other adtech networks work.

I personally believe that Apple is able to make different (better), choices in the name of a consumer privacy, than Google will.

Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech - that's their revenue model. I don't begrudge them that, people should have choice, etc. but the revenue model is adtech first and foremost.

Apple want services revenue, they like services revenue, but historically they're a vertically integrated tech platform manufacturer whose revenue model is building better platforms consumers want.

It's true that the services model may start to compromise that - and they've definitely started to make some poor choices they might need to pull back on to protect the core platform model - but I do think we're not comparing like with like when we say that Apple is no different to any other company in this space.

[owkman]

> Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech

I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?

Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.

[saagarjha]

iAd doesn't exist anymore.

[bluedevilzn]

Yes but this exists - ads.apple.com

[saagarjha]

Those are App Store search ads I think

[kelvinjps10]

You can use Android without Google

[hajile]

In practical terms, you can't without switching to another company with an android variant that is just as bad.

[nobleach]

I'm guessing the poster is referring to AOSP and custom ROMs. If so, yes, it is entirely possible, but not something I'd expect any normal human being to do.

[hajile]

Not all phones allow custom ROMs and most that do completely void your warranty. Doing it yourself is a complete non-starter for at least 95% of the population.

[lern_too_spel]

In practical terms, you can simply not log into a Google account on any Android device, including those made by Google, and Google will get less data about you than Apple does on iOS.

The key difference is user choice. An iOS user has no choice but to send their location data and app usage data to Apple. No such required privacy violations on Android.

[fennecbutt]

Yup exactly. Do people jot remember that Apple never gave a damn about privacy for the longest time, then when Google, Facebook and others' ingestion of "meta data" became the public issue du jour that is when Apple started pushing the whole privacy thing. It's a selling point, nothing more.

[firefax]

>Did anyone honestly think that Apple was touting privacy as anything other than a competitive advantage for revenue maximization?

I think they're more willing to build out privacy enhancing features than other companies that don't rely on surveillance capitalism to make their money. "Small" things like Filevault add up.

[petesergeant]

I have no trouble believing a gay boomer from the South instinctively cares about personal privacy; he will have spent much of his early life needing to be very protective of his.

[Wobbles42]

I would agree that most people with that exact background would have learned the hard way to care about privacy.

The single example that ascended to be the CEO of Apple though? That selection process would seem more relevant than any personal background.

My base assumption is that any impressions we have about Tim Cook (or any other executive of a company that size) are a carefully crafted artifact of marketing and PR. He may be a real person behind the scenes, but his (and everyone's) media persona is a fictional character he is portraying.

[petesergeant]

It feels like if you'd expect someone to be something based on their background, _and_ they profess to be that thing, then the onus is on the person disputing it to come up with the evidence contra?

> any impressions we have about Tim Cook ... is a fictional character he is portraying

The relevant ones here are that he's gay, of a certain age, and from the South, and that he heads up a company who appear to invest heavily, over a long period of time, in privacy protections -- these all feel like they'd be easy to falsify if there existed evidence to the contrary.

[ImJamal]

That is why he does service in China where the government has full access to all cloud data.

[20after4]

Similar to how Google merged with DoubleClick and threw out the whole "don't be evil" policy.

My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.

[jobs_throwaway]

> My luke-warm take is that the advertising industry is inherently evil.

Why? I like using ad-supported services, and have found some life-changing products/services via targeted ads.

[Wobbles42]

The "don't be evil" thing has always surprised me. Why would a company that has decided to embrace evil want to admit that publically?

[BLKNSLVR]

Graft versus host.

[braebo]

If evil is the absence of empathy, it’s capitalism in general that systematically cultivates this absence.

[someNameIG]

Their privacy commitments align with their business, not their morals. They don't want an open internet primarily funded by advertising, so they make harder for advertising companies to track their users. What they want is an internet silod into apps you get from their app store, that are funded buy subscriptions and IAPs that they get a 30% cut from.

[piyuv]

I like this comment because of its brutal honesty.

“They don’t want <bad thing> so they choose <equally bad thing good for their revenue>”

[kergonath]

We can have both, because they cannot kill the web. We can enjoy better privacy in the OS, the open Web, and better controls for the applications that should not be a website (which is still quite a lot of them).

[piyuv]

Then you can’t have trillion dollar monopolies with billionaire owners funding fascist regimes.

[kergonath]

I think I can live without that, to be honest.

[drooopy]

Apple is a for-profit business, and like most such entities, its primary concern is its bottom line. If promoting privacy aligns with that objective, so be it. However, the company does not have an inherent inclination toward acting ethically beyond what serves its business interests.

[joshkel]

That's not universally true, at least. From https://www.macobserver.com/news/tim-cook-rejects-ncppr-poli...:

> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

> As evidenced by the use of “bloody” in his response—the closest thing to public profanity I've ever seen from Mr. Cook–it was clear that he was quite angry. His body language changed, his face contracted, and he spoke in rapid fire sentences compared to the usual metered and controlled way he speaks.

More broadly, I know that for-profit businesses are concerned with their bottom line, and I know businesses regularly throw other values under the bus in pursuit of profit. But I'm not sure it's possible to build a successful business (in terms of maintaining consumer trust, attracting and motivating decent employees, etc.) without some values beyond what's immediately quantifiable on the bottom line.

[whatnow37373]

The point is not they lack values at any point in time, the point is they can switch them faster than you can say “capitalism”.

[poincaredisk]

>“I don't consider the bloody ROI.” He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.

...and you believed him? I'm sorry, I'm trying to be less cynical in life, but he said exactly what people - apple fans - want to hear.

Is he above lying? We were just discussing how one of the apple executives straight up lied in court.

[joshkel]

Belief within limits, yes. At least, I can only think of a couple of possible explanations for the event:

1. Cook only cares about pursuing profits, but at a shareholder meeting where shareholders were pressuring him to pursue profits, he lied to them (and had the presence of mind and acting chops to pretend to be uncharacteristically angry about it), because he believed that the story would get reported on and Apple fans would want to hear it, and he made the calculation that that would be more beneficial to his bottom line than being honest (or at least more politically neutral) with his shareholders.

2. Cook really does believe about accessibility, environmental issues, and worker safety, and he tries (or at least likes to think that he tries) to take steps toward those causes at the expense of profits, but he's also a complex and flawed mixture of motivations and is capable of compromising his values (and/or of letting those under him compromise their values) to varying degrees in the face of financial rewards or the pressures of the capitalist system.

#2 seems more likely and is more consistent with my view of humanity in general.

[danaris]

It's also worth noting that the meeting in question was in 2104. That's over a decade ago now.

It's entirely possible that Cook was fully sincere then, but that over the subsequent 11 years, marinating in the toxic stew that is the upper echelons of American industry has eroded his principles and he is now more willing to listen to the voices pushing for money over all else (whether those voices are outside or inside his own head).

[Wobbles42]

#2 seems more probable to me for any given human being selected at random.

#1 seems more probable given a human being that has been selected to head one of the most valuable companies on the planet. That's his entire job -- to play a carefully crafted role for the public, the share holders and the media. He isn't paid to stand up at a shareholder meeting and let any sort of genuine feelings slip through, unless those feelings happen to be the right ones for that role at that moment.

[pi-err]

Pretty sure this is not about revenue but profit margins, since the Services line was under heavy surveillance by markets back then.

Though that's the core issue, margins on services are just too addictive for big tech. Not sure Apple can keep its recipe for success with both services and hardware.

[whatnow37373]

> I can't trust that Apple is honest about their privacy commitments

Oh, no! Who would have thought? What could we possibly do other than keep shoving money into their faces?

[buyucu]

Everybody knows that Apple's privacy commitments are a joke. Closed source software can't commit to privacy.

[Mindwipe]

I mean, if Apple were ever serious there would be a way to have applications installed on iOS without having to tell Apple.

They were never serious.