alt Hacker NewsIt is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Are they perfect? Not even close, but compared to the rest of big tech theyre simply on another level.
Apple could easily not do this stuff and it may even be easier to not.
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Apple is on the side of privacy if it serves their marketing. Which is why they would rather build and normalize CLIENT SIDE CONTENT SCANNING so they can continue to market iCloud as "secure and private".
If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.
Apple is very much like WhatsApp. Yes you cant perfectly trust their E2EE against state actors, but both in fact put some effort into making world have little bit more privacy.
At least on Desktop we have usable Linux, but on the phones there is literally nothing usable because thanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months.
Yes its possible to make Andoid spy on you a little less, but even for tech savvy person its damn inconvinient and Google making platform worse with every single release.
Thanks to Google "security" I can use my banking apps on 9 years old device with 6 years outdated firmware, but not on GrapheneOS.
Privacy is a natural fit for Apple in that they make money on discrete devices, but services have grown tremendously. That’s where the erosion of privacy happens.
So once there’s a profit motive for violating your privacy, the justification for eroding your privacy will proceed. It’s really the inertia of Apple starting out as privacy-compatible that makes them hesitant to throw that away.
Apple may be on the side of privacy, but since they are competing everybody out of the market with their slick consumer products they actually form a threat to privacy since now the government has to only implement a backdoor at one vendor.
Indeed.
But they are until they are actually defeated. I would rather plan for failure. We are in a global climate where court rulings can be ignored.
I was an engineer at both MS and Apple. At Apple, privacy was baked into every new feature from the start. At MS, the privacy component was glued on at the very end, if ever.
Like OP said, Apple isn't perfect nor will they ever be, but they do prioritize privacy better than most.
I said this in another thread a while ago, and one of these people who thinks Apple isn’t on the side of privacy cited a lawsuit they settled around Siri listened to conversations: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-cla...
People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.
It is crazy that I do not trust a multi-trillion dollar company who has forced labor in their supply chain to have my best interests in mind? It is crazy to me you would think they do not understand the concept of lip service.
These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.
Apple is on the side of privacy, except when you want privacy from Apple:
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)
170 points by ingve on Nov 1, 2024 | 127 comments
And whenever your privacy contradicts their control over "your" device, you are also out of luck, e.g., you can't have Ublock Origin on an iPhone. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921
> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy.
> It also ensured pressure from governments and plaintiffs, including CSAM victims, who preferred Apple’s more interventionist approaches, which Apple had voluntarily demonstrated it was willing to do.
I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". I use scare quotes there because I don't think that political or religious dissidents would find that the same or similar technology used to discover and persecute them is "privacy preserving". And that's really the problem with Apple here. They provided a model for scanning for any kind of message or material while purportedly maintaining privacy.