Our Approach to Privacy

It all boils down to what you see in the public. The FBI was trying to get Apple to create an iOS variant to extract data from a device, to the point where Tim Cook wrote a letter refusing to do so and was willing to fight it in court. In a similar fashion, Apple has given talks and white papers on iOS security. In tandem with these well documented white papers and talks discussing the internal functions of iOS, we haven't seen any well known or trivial exploits appear to surface that demonstrate flaws in them.

In the case of the FBI fiasco, for example, we know that the FBI later paid Cellebrite for an exploit that allowed them to unlock the device. We don't know the details of how that happened, but the FBI had to reach out to an independent company and exploit an older device to do it.

To be clear: if they were lying about the lengths they go to with encryption, on device security, and user trust, this story would have been different. The FBI would have already had a backdoor or been able to trivially break the device, or they would have complied and created an iOS variant to break in. All we know is what they stood their ground on, and the effort that was required for the FBI to get in.

iOS 10 security white paper: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

Talk about iOS security at Black Hat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U

I'm happy Apple is at least trying hard to deal with privacy but honestly I don't think they are doing enough, at least for me.

For example, I don't really want to give most apps constant access to my photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don't have a whole lot of choice if I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..

I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo. Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.

As for the Camera I don't give any of those apps access to the camera because I don't trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.

Mic access is more problematic. I don't want any of them to have mic access when I'm not using the mic function directly but I can't talk to my friends who use all those services to call me if I don't give the apps mic access.

I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they'd handle these issues in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases. Don't let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app, and then just giving the result to the app.

Apple chose to let the China government into their China data center and Google chose to leave the country instead. So not so simple on who you trust. Personally I trust Google more as they are just a lot better at keeping things secure, imo. Plus governments getting into data is a bigger deal to me than a targeted ad. But it is a personal decision.

"A Local Chinese Government Will Oversee Apple’s New iCloud Data Center"

http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/apple-china-icloud-data-center...

Yes. And we can.

There is no upside and potentially massive downside/fallout for Apple to just lie about something like this.

Maybe they will 'screw up' - but it would be completely stupid for them to say one thing, and then intentionally do another.

A 0.5% drop in sales would be a disaster.

Twitter can cause quite a storm these days, companies are generally afraid of it.

If it were Google, or FB, it would be another story, because their business is your personal information.

But Apple - not so much. They want to hustle hardware. For them 'your data' is mostly a hassle they'd rather wash their hands of.

> they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo

I don't think this is true though. From the code I've seen you only get returned the single UIPhoto the user chose.

also remember you can revoke permissions at any time via Settings.