alt Hacker News> Apple claims to protect user privacy all the time. But they can't offer a product in a major jurisdiction that has actually meaningful privacy laws? Didn't they consider that while designing the product?
Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.
In another regulatory area (not privacy, but something more historically regulated) we ran into strange situations where complying with the letter of the law would require us to walk back things that we had done in a better way. The laws are not simple and they're not written by engineers or even people who understand what future product needs look like.
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It's incredible how people are acutely aware how technically inept regulators are (laws affecting their personal use of technology) and how quickly they side with regulators when a law affects how corporations use/create technology.
If regulators suck at understanding tech, they are making poorly thought out laws for corporations just as much as they are for you.
Privacy laws are not complex, they only become complex if your goal is to actually skirt them.
Tax laws are also quite easy, tax lawyers are only needed if you want to NOT pay what the country you're operating in is owed.
Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.
Maybe it's more because the privacy is largely marketing and helps with continuously shutting out competitors under the guise of privacy?
If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups [1] by default and not just when ADP is enabled, which only a small subset of users do. In fact, many technical people I know don't even realize that iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted. At any rate, this large hole opens a lot of data (including iMesssage) open to Apple, law enforcement, etc.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
[1] And iCloud Drive, and photos, and notes, and voice memos, and wallet passes, and contacts, and reminders, and...