[mingus88]

Serious answers?

Vertical integration of hardware/firmware/OS/Software/services from a big tech firm that isn’t making their margins from selling my personal data and actually delivers industry leading privacy features

Pushing ads through the Wallet is pretty gauche though. Nobody’s perfect

[bigyabai]

Vertical integration I can understand. Give a man money, and he'll pay for convenience. But this?

> actually delivers industry leading privacy features

You can't prove that to save your life. You can hope that Apple delivers industry-leading privacy features... but there is no iOS Open Source Project for you to audit. Apple sues security researchers, the most cutting-edge iOS vulnerability engineers make six figures working for NSO Group. You aren't trusted with an open bootloader to try using other phone ROMs, not that anything would stop it from working. You aren't given a way to roll back updates if Apple makes a controversial change to their security model. Apple won't even give you alternatives to features they admit are backdoored[0].

It's entirely a system of trust. If you don't trust Apple unconditionally, the magic of their products starts to collapse. It's not a new trend either, people in this thread are right to call back to the "gracious" free U2 album. Or further back to the coinage of "Reality Distortion Field" itself.

> Nobody’s perfect

You say that like there's no way to fix this. As though you live in an alternate reality where it's somehow impossible to write software that respects the user, or legislate guidelines that enforces fair competition.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

[mingus88]

Read up on private compute cloud, the transparency log and published binaries, the VRE, use of oHTTP proxies …

And then come back and tell me that there is anyone else going through such hoops (at not charge) to make sure they know nothing about you and you don’t need to trust them for the system to work

[bigyabai]

Gladly. There are cheaper products from competing companies going through more hoops to make sure you have cellular privacy and don't need to trust the OEM for the system to work.

Whitepapers are whitepapers. Apple had Push Notification whitepapers that insisted the data was private, look how that turned out. I don't care about their third-party auditors, I want transparency and I don't care who calls me crazy for it.

[HenryBemis]

It's not "the third party auditors", it is the scope of the audits that I don't trust. They pick the control "how long do you bake the chicken in the oven", and the report title cab be "enforcing harse conditions and conditions of stress in operations". And later some PR asshole will say "see the audit report summary? no failures to ourfite-proof processes!!!"

[latexr]

> Apple had Push Notification whitepapers that insisted the data was private, look how that turned out.

How did it turn out? Could you expand on or link to what you’re talking about?