Is there some actual evidence of collusion with the big tech companies? Because I haven’t seen it. (Telecoms I’ve heard were and are much more integrated.)
The next Snowden disclosure (MUSCULAR) was significantly more concerning though. It was that the NSA was tapping the internal fiber of Big Tech companies. I was at Google when the Snowden disclosures broke, and read the SRE postmortem. They found 2 fiber cuts underneath the English Channel, an hour apart, lining up with the start of the program as disclosed by Snowden. My inference is that the NSA paid off MI6 to send a submarine commando team to cut and tap the fiber of an American company, without consent, and then all the data was shared through Five-Eyes reciprocal data sharing agreements. Google leadership was hopping mad after this, but it would've been impolitic to bring it to the public. They started encrypting all internal traffic soon after, assuming that their internal network was compromised by various nation-state actors, which had some unfortunate effects on their internal culture of openness.
The head security guy where I worked 20 years ago was already saying this.
Anywhere I’ve worked it was firewall everything and use VPNs, and most places still do this. SFTP was in the too hard basket. And of course that led to people emailing files around as standard practice (and the only option) and inevitably some got emailed to the wrong recipients.
Honestly, based on what? That they haven't been caught?
That said they are not perfect - e.g their wording in their own tracking consent prompts vs the ones they force on others.
That's marketing. Do you always trust everything in marketing material?
Always missing from the paranoid lunatic side of this discussion: what devices do you use? I presume you do all your computing on an abacus?
Quite a bold statement. How do they compare with technology companies such as proton, signal... ?
With Apple, you are the customer. With others, you’re the product. It’s an easy differentiator for them, plain and simple.
Phone theft is a growing problem again, but it’s still less common than it was because they need to get an unlocked device, and I don’t hear them targeting Apple in particular.
> They sell their own products to you and that’s all they care about.
You can also extend this to say that they want you to only buy their devices/services. If you have an iPhone then non-Apple smart watches are missing basic functionality such as replying to text messages. Force everyone to use Safari and limit it's functionality to force apps onto the App Store (30% cut!).
I mean, it's what they _say_ they do. Do we know?
Do you have any evidence to present, or is this pure FUD?
But I do think that, in general, Apple tends to be the least-bad actor among its mainstream competitors: its primary business model does not depend on harvesting and selling data, and it has made this value proposition a part of its marketing, and people high up in the company have spoken about ways that they personally value it. And, for any story about ways in which Apple has failed here, there are certainly twice as many for any other company they compete with.
I mean, step back: Who cares more about my privacy - Apple or Google? Apple or Roku? Can anyone seriously argue the latter for either?
> I'm only asking if people put faith in Apples claims because they're, well, Apple, or do we _know_ their claims are valid.
If we _know_, then there would be no need for faith. Given the lack of options and the lack of certainty, people must place their faith somewhere (or take on a lot of technical burden to roll their own); given everything I've seen, it's more reasonable to place faith in Apple than basically anyone else in "Big Tech" in this regard.
(But again: if there's a product out there that is very similar to Apple TV in every way except that it is more private: please tell me what that product is. I'd be thrilled to consider it.)
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
HN is countless different people with the full range of views on most topics. “It” doesn't hate (or love) any one thing, and these kinds of comments insinuating that it is one entity with one view are so lame. Please observe the guidelines if you want to participate here.
Yes, Apple has actually put work into designing, building, and shipping secure enclaves. Yes, they have put a gargantuan amount of work into PCC to uphold the claims they make about its privacy. Yes, they employ differential privacy. Yes, they have shipped a feature that enables privacy-conscious users to be the only ones to hold the keys to their iCloud account. And on and on and on. Nothing will ever be enough for you.
You aren’t asking these questions in good faith. If you were, you’d have your answers already.
I have and don't see much evidence at all except a bunch of influencers saying Apple is tops in privacy.
Apple has plenty of default settings gaps that allow THEM to collect your data. They capitulate in certain markets. And who knows what Trump made them do?
I presume truth and facts are important, no?
This is a funny one because users need to opt-in to sharing app install analytics with app developers. You don't get to opt-out of sharing it with Apple, even if you're installing apps from a third-party app store!
…while running far worse stuff themselves, the whole time.
This is all only mentioned in the footnote of an iCloud security document [1].
Apple cares about your privacy, so much that they made a backdoor through bad defaults, well in reach of the CLOUD Act.
[1] Footnote 9 in https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
Most people don't even understand that when their favorite app that says E2E that that app still has access to the clear text before it's encrypted...
They want the device to be a mechanism for you to purchase things. Hence the “Apple card” and all the hullabaloo around that. You’ll only use your phone if you perceive it to be secure. Apple’s investments in Secure Enclave’s, sandboxing are all directly linked to their belief that this will help the consumer perceive the safety of the product- and again, it goes back to the perception of the brand.
Quality craftsmanship has properties that outsiders can perceive- even if they don’t understand it. Apple makes those investments.
Google- well, they just make things and then abandon them. Android’s bizzaro world open source is a chaotic mess that reflects the lack of discipline in Google’s leadership.
And I don't know what Google has to do with this.
I trust Apple for a number of reasons, but I really had to be really aggressive about the TV it’s connected to.
But also, a smaller footprint is a smaller footprint. I’ll take “better” where I can get it.
If/when devices start shipping with cellular modems and eSIMs... honestly not sure. Faraday cage? Physically remove the modem? (If that doesn't prevent the device from booting.)
If it does then don’t buy it?
For privacy, I'd recommend hardware with as few blobs as possible and of course an unlocked bootloader.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers.
The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection. It doesn’t matter all of the drastic steps they’ve taken to ensure that past mistakes are never made again or that their hands are tied when governments make demands of them in the future. It doesn’t matter that they’re demonstrably orders of magnitude better than everyone else.
Only for internet comment purposes. I’ve found that these same jabronis actually tend to run crappy and wildly unsafe home rolled kludges, for themselves.
Or maybe they are just not caught yet. They are now running ads, where is the data coming for that. They stop others from using the APIs but nothing stop their first party apps to snoop and use the data.
Apple AirTag is the biggest privacy nightmare out there and I am not sure why people keep Apple separate from other data hungry companies