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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”

#311

Post by burtonator »

kodablah wrote: post #303
burtonator wrote: post #258

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…

> We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques. And you always will. Principles and money are often at odds. This is not an easily fixable problem as the well-intended solutions often cause more problems. Enforcement of existing statutes and accepting legal-yet-unethical practices is unfortunately the most rational approach. > We just can't com…

> Only in a situation where interminable growth is required in a race to the top.

The key is that they choke you out... They have more engineers, more R&D and a better product because they have more revenue.

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

#312

Post by strictnein »

robocat wrote: post #187
leereeves wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple sells a walled garden that controls what software you can use, forces upgrades by forbidding repairs and slowing down old phones with software updates, and sells more dongles by eliminating features and changing ports in every generation of their products. I admit they are better than Google on the privacy issue, but should we be grateful for having an alternative that abuses us in different ways?

Each of your complaints is because of a well-designed compromise (app quality/safety; preventing abrupt phone shutdown; removing a common failure point). You may disagree with the compromises, sure. PS: I own zero Apple devices (partly because of the reasons you have, not for the way you are misrepresenting those reasons).

Apple was never a player in the ad market, so which of these "well-designed compromises" went against their bottom line?

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

#313

Post by mcphage »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #147
jason46 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what would apple use if google was not paying, or if google charged apple? This seems backwards to me.

They're literally the biggest tech company in the world. Couldn't they build their own? I mean, it wouldn't be great at first but seems like a worthwhile project (and Microsoft managed it with Bing, so there's precedent there).

> They're literally the biggest tech company in the world. Couldn't they build their own?

A search engine is a big enough process—and difficult enough—that you can't just throw money at it and expect it to work in the end. They could try, certainly. And maybe they'd succeed, and maybe they'd fail. And maybe they'd succeed but end up with a successful business unit whose goals are opposed to the rest of the company's.

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

#314

Post by Spooky23 »

jessaustin wrote: post #292
Spooky23 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Calling that "$1" is an impressive lack of financial clue.

It's a message board, not a business case.

If you have a long-duration, pre-negotiated contract with carriers, where you are essentially financing the $500 phone cost every 18-30 months via the service plan, the marginal cost is the metric that matters.

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

#315

Post by Mononokay »

strictnein wrote: post #312
robocat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each of your complaints is because of a well-designed compromise (app quality/safety; preventing abrupt phone shutdown; removing a common failure point). You may disagree with the compromises, sure. PS: I own zero Apple devices (partly because of the reasons you have, not for the way you are misrepresenting those reasons).

Apple was never a player in the ad market, so which of these "well-designed compromises" went against their bottom line?

Worth noting that they do have an ad platform, actually, and that all apps on the App Store are mandated to use it if wanting to monetize.

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

#316

Post by DCKing »

tinco wrote: post #192
mark_l_watson wrote: post #32

I like Tim Cook, I think his heart is in the right place and as much as a corporation can, Apple generally does the right thing. I was having lunch with several lawyers at my company a few weeks ago. One of them was talking strongly about quality devices and Apple’s strong privacy stance. He literally said that we as a society should be grateful for having Apple.

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…

> 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. This is how all companies work. I just really like that this competitive edge exists in the first place. If this competitive edge exists and works, it might actually be stronger as Apple can continue maintaining this stance in the future.

Although I'm not a big Apple user myself (I think/hope I can defend myself enough on other platforms that have a lower cost of entry), it's nice that you can point to iPhones if people are asking for on which they can take reasonable ownership of their privacy without needing to be very tech savvy.

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

#317

Post by acct1771 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #249
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.

Just buy an Android device and opt out of all the tracking? People behave as if this is impossible, but the options are all right there in the settings. There are a few places you lose some features but not super significant ones, and mostly those are because the tracking is intrinsically involved in the functions of the app.

Carrier IQ, etc. Look it up.

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

#319

Post by kodablah »

burtonator wrote: post #311
kodablah wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques. And you always will. Principles and money are often at odds. This is not an easily fixable problem as the well-intended solutions often cause more problems. Enforcement of existing statutes and accepting legal-yet-unethical practices is unfortunately the most rational approach. > We just can't com…

> Only in a situation where interminable growth is required in a race to the top. The key is that they choke you out... They have more engineers, more R&D and a better product because they have more revenue.

If they have a better product, so be it. But I'm not convinced that more engineers and more R&D necessarily lead to that, nor am I convinced that smaller, more niche products are always choked out. If that were the case, we'd only have huge companies and a bunch of choked out entrepreneurs. Rather, a bunch of us out here with small companies are doing just fine. Definitely not a give up situation like "we just can't compete". That mentality gives rise to nuclear options with unintended consequences.

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

#320

Post by simias »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #267
simias wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems extremely hard to achieve that though. Creating a new smartphone hardware is very difficult and expensive. Creating a new smartphone OS and ecosystem is probably even harder. In order to have a proper "libre" smartphone you'd need to basically do both things. If behemoths like Microsoft couldn't pull it off I'm not sure how a newcomer could. I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could e…

https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

Doesn't fit the bill yet. It's not cheap enough (you can get an iPhone 8 for the same price) and it remain to be seen if it'll manage to generate a viable ecosystem of apps around its platform. We also can't judge of the quality of the finished product yet.

I genuinely hope they succeed but that's clearly not the "Honda or Kia" of smartphones the parent was talking about, at least not in this iteration.

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