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Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

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Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#251

Post by School-Cotton »

chongli wrote: post #28
simonh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's stance has been completely consistent. They comply with the law while making their ethical beliefs and stance as a company clear where they disagree with it. What do you suggest Apple should do instead of comply with the law? Require it's employees to incriminate themselves?

What do you suggest Apple should do instead of comply with the law? Require it's employees to incriminate themselves? I'm not the GP but I've seen this exact form of complaint many times. I think the usual response is "stop doing business in China." I don't know how that's supposed to work, though, since Chinese companies make all of Apple's hardware.

Chinese companies assemble Apple’s hardware.

The phase of iPhone manufacture that’s done in China involves screwdrivers and glue, not high-tech fabs. It could be done elsewhere for a smaller price increase than you might expect.

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#252

Post by cal5k »

parthdesai wrote: post #242
tinco wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is cynicism, but I'm pretty sure this is just Apple exploiting a competitive edge, and does not necessarily reflect his own opinion, he is speaking to benefit the company. Of course, it's very nice that Apple made the decision to pick this edge, but they did it because they could not compete with Google on web services. So now they're publicly speaking to try and take the sting out of Google's edge. And th…

I'm always baffled how even the tech-literate crowd here continues to give Apple a pass. This is the same Apple that gave up its encryptions keys to Chinese government for the servers located in China. If it actually had user's privacy in mind, it wouldn't give those up.

I think that’s an over-simplistic view. Failing to adhere to Chinese law would mean exiting the Chinese market. If the US passed a similar law, Apple would be forced to comply with it (although they would at least have recourse through the courts to eventually show that such a law was, perhaps, unconstitutional).

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#253

Post by how_to_bake »

walterbell wrote: post #38

Hi Apple. Please: • add VPN on/off to control center • allow per-app VPN via Apple Configurator, without enterprise MDM • once the above two are available, we can use Tor, IDS, DPI or pihole on a per-application basis, to reduce data harvesting • bonus1: allow the open-source iOS MDM community OR the iOS Shortcuts community to make it easy for novice users to have one-click install of "privacy-plus configurations" •…

I believe you now can use a Siri shortcut to create a button that goes in your widgets area that turns the VPN on or off.

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#254

Post by leereeves »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #222
leereeves wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's App Store policies are about far more than app quality or safety. Apple has banned many apps for political or financial reasons. Slowing down old phones without notice or permission wasn't the best response to aging batteries. Even Apple didn't deny it was wrong. They apologized, once they were caught. And the MagSafe connector was not a common failure point.

> Apple bans competing apps regardless of app quality or safety. I don't know what criteria they actually use, but this is at best incredibly inconsistent. There's heaps of competing mail apps, calendars, camera apps, photo apps, weather apps, notes apps, reminders app, messaging apps on iOS, including a Google one in most of those categories.

I know that once upon a time they banned competing apps, including Google Voice. I don't know if that behavior continues but I think it's a bit too soon to forget.

https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/apple-is-growing-rotten-to...

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#255

Post by oddevan »

zmmmmm wrote: post #246

I wish I could separate his position from Apple's marketing stance. Unfortunately here he seems to use such hyperbolic language that it puts me on the side of "this is marketing". It seems very hard to separate cause and effect (is Apple's market strategy because of his beliefs on privacy, or is it the other way around?). But this kind of tilts me towards the latter.

Why not both?

Apple's market strategy was already primed towards a privacy-focused stance, since their profit center is selling physical devices. Thus, when privacy becomes a Big Deal in the world, Tim doesn't have to push hard to get Apple to line up with his beliefs. If Apple had been an advertising-focused company before Snowden, I doubt we'd be seeing as hard a push as they're giving right now.

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#256

Post by kodablah »

orbifold wrote: post #23

It's sad how the introduction of a new class of devices "smartphones" brought along with it a surveillance software platform in the form of Android. Where it is clear that the only incentive for google to develop it is exfiltration of as much personal data as they can. In contrast in the case of Apple you have a customer relationship with the company that sold you the device and they have an incentive to keep you as…

Personally, I find the introduction of devices with software and distribution lockdown to be much more concerning. As a customer, my relationship with Apple has always been a middle finger from them. The saddest thing is watching everyone cheer them on. Many would much rather be surveiled by Google than be treated as hostile by Apple, and that choice is ok.

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#257

Post by stephenr »

ThomPete wrote: post #247
stephenr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name an advantage to google knowing what colour underwear you bought last Thursday at 3pm from an eBay seller called “thrusty jack”? Siri/iOS/macOS/etc are proof that “smart” services can be done on-device and/or without identifying information and still be useful. Google does it all server side because it’s the cash cow their entire business is built on, not because it’s the only way to do it.

Hmm that wasn't actually what I said. So not sure how to respond to that.

You literally said:

> I would also caution against the push for almost complete privacy as that IMO leaves out a number of potential advantages from systems having enormous amounts of data about us.

So I created an example. Forget my example if you wish, I still have the same question. What benefit is there specifically, from companies "having enormous amounts of data about us"?

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#258

Post by burtonator »

I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys here. I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom and worked to push open content and social media.

I started a social data search platform named Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which is basically a petabyte-scale content indexing engine.

We provide API feeds to search engines and social media analytics companies needing bulk data but don't want to have to build a crawler.

For the last 5 years we've had major problems with customers coming to us asking for data which we felt was unethical (at best).

We actually had Saudi Arabia approach us... It was clear that they were intending to something pretty evil with the data.

Their RFP questions were a bit frightening:

- can you track people by religion?

- can you give us their email address?

- can you provide their address?

- can your provide their ethnicity?

- can you provide their social connections?

We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques.

We just can't compete with data at that type of fidelity.

If you're a researcher and you want to access bulk data for combating this type of non-sense WE WILL PROVIDE DATA AT COST. We can provide up to 1PB of data but for now we have to charge for the shipping and handling of that data. We're reaching out to some other companies like Google and also the Internet Archive to see if we can provide more cost effective solutions.

I'm working on more tools to give the power back to the users.

Polar (https://getpolarized.io/) is a web browser which allows people to control their own data. The idea is that I can keep a local repository of data and eventually build our own cloud platform based on open systems like IPFS and encrypt the data using group encryption.

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#259

Post by Spooky23 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #194

The only problem is that Apple is the Mercedes of mobile devices. We really need a Honda and Kia version, a more affordable device that doesn’t track you. Apple is never going to give up their premium position.

Not really. They own like 50% of the market. They position like 1960 GM. The $1,500 iPhone is the aspirational thing that everyone talks about. If you have money, you buy the iPhone Xs (ie the Cadillac), if you want to look "better", buy the Xr (Buick), if you don't care, you buy the iPhone 7 (the Chevy). There is almost nothing that the $1,500 phone does that the $1 phone does not.

The cheapo androids are more like the Yugo of mobile devices, and the nicer Androids basically cost the same or a little more. iPhone 7 is $1 on many promo deals.

If you go to companies with compliance requirements, iPhone owns the market, and is by far the cheapest solution. One of my "side hustles" in a very large org was managing about 40k iOS devices and 400 android devices... it basically cost about $9/year to manage, including staff. Staffing was basically 40-60% of two IT guys and half of 3 interns. If we broke the cost down further, the Androids would have been significantly more expensive, as additional 3rd party software was required as well as many more man-hours.

The iPhone is magic in that way, with sufficient scale, you deliver almost magical capability to your whole company, including network connectivity, for less than the run cost of a PC. And it costs something like 80% less to manage than a PC. If you look at companies in industries like field service, iPhones are almost a profit center.

Re: Tim Cook makes blistering attack on the “data industrial complex”

#260

Post by simias »

zmmmmm wrote: post #246

I wish I could separate his position from Apple's marketing stance. Unfortunately here he seems to use such hyperbolic language that it puts me on the side of "this is marketing". It seems very hard to separate cause and effect (is Apple's market strategy because of his beliefs on privacy, or is it the other way around?). But this kind of tilts me towards the latter.

Sometimes the stars align. Clearly Apple is in a good position to take this stance because they don't have a lot to lose if stronger privacy protecting regulations are enacted while their competitors, especially Google, would take a significant hit.

That being said I can totally believe that he genuinely believes what he says. Actually I'd wager that most tech people, including at Google and Facebook, see that we're having a problem with "big data" and the compulsive profiling of their users. The potential for abuse is tremendous.

Regardless of ulterior motives I think we should rejoice, having a behemoth like Apple taking such a clear stance on this issue could generate enough momentum to have an actual change in mentalities.

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