[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.

[FMecha]

AMD brands it AMD Secure Technology/Platform Security Processor, and the same backdoor concern is there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

[amelius]

Yeah but ultimately it's the US government doing that, not Intel. There is no business model behind it.

[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.