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Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

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Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#21

Post by eklavyaa »

dijit wrote: post #10
blatchcorn wrote: post #2

Apple is a 'use all of our products, or else we will make life inconvenient for you' company. The fact that this happens to offer some privacy benefits is just a strategy credit[1] [1] https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/

Not sure how true this is. I run my own infra (caldav,carddav,imap/smtp) and all of it intergrates seamlessly into iOS and macOS. I tried the same on android and it did not work seamlessly with anything except google services. Sure, their own stuff works better with their own stuff, and yes, the watches can't be configured without a phone, but that's also true of android.

Thats more of a business interest, Apple dont want to focus on other platforms, rather promotes its own ecosystem

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#22

Post by nafizh »

Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. I for one, am happy that Apple can afford to offer privacy as one of its strong suites. Whether they can do it because of their business model or not is moot IMO. Everyone is here to make money, I would rather have someone who doesn't have to sell every aspect of my life to do it.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#24

Post by jsgo »

robjan wrote: post #12
SXX wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in any way an Apple fan and only look at their ecosystem via VM, but I curious. What company have more convenient integration of both own proprietary services and 3rd-party one? As I see it with Apple you can be at least fairly sure their products going to have good integration within their closed-garden ecosystem. With anyone else not even this is guaranteed and you'll likely be bombarded by ads. I'm among t…

I can use Google Drive on pretty much anything. Now try using iCloud Drive on an Android...

Sure, but if you’re not using Apple products, why would you want iCloud Drive? I mean if it wasn’t deeply connected with iOS and I could slot in any third party, I’d probably never pay for iCloud Drive either.

If you want third party on Android, Microsoft’s 1TB of OneDrive as part of Office 365 (can buy annual subscriptions at a discount from Amazon as well) seems the better deal.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#25

Post by yholio »

It's a devil's bargain: now we have to choose between walled gardens that offer some privacy and extract their revenue from lock-in, and more open systems that live off spying our data.

Truth be told, the software development cost of these systems (Android and iOS) is not that huge, a reasonably good open source alternative could probably be created for less than a billion dollars, knowing how financially efficient are open source projects compared to commercial companies. That's a few cents per smartphone user per year, for the next decade, negligible compared to hardware costs.

If this order of magnitude funding could be secured for a well organized open source project, we could have the best of both worlds, a truly open ecosystem with privacy at it's center.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#26

Post by eklavyaa »

wereHamster wrote: post #7
eklavyaa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its still fine, as long as someone can afford it. We can't ask them to be fair its just take it or leave it. These days privacy is a luxury, rather than a fundamental right.

> These days privacy is a luxury, rather than a fundamental right. The EU things differently. For us privacy is very much a fundamental right, such as right for access to clean water/air, right for free access to information (internet) etc.

In some countries clean water/air and internet are still luxury my friend

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#27

Post by GTP »

xvector wrote: post #9
wereHamster wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days privacy is a luxury, rather than a fundamental right. The EU things differently. For us privacy is very much a fundamental right, such as right for access to clean water/air, right for free access to information (internet) etc.

And yet Google and Facebook still regularly invade privacy and build shadow profiles of users.

Yes, but they have been already fined in the past and law enforcement is keeping an eye on them. This could be better of course, but keep in mind that the GDPR is still a new thing and enforcing it requires time.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#28

Post by grumdan »

nafizh wrote: post #22

Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. I for one, am happy that Apple can afford to offer privacy as one of its strong suites. Whether they can do it because of their business model or not is moot IMO. Everyone is here to make money, I would rather have someone who doesn't have to sell every aspect of my life to do it.

Whether it's because of their business model is an important question though, because it may tell us if we this has a good chance of being genuine and whether we can expect this to last. If it's in their financial interest to protect users' privacy, then I'm much more inclined to believe that they are actually trying to do that.

If they right now appear to care about privacy, but it's for some other reason, I'd expect financial motives to eventually overrule that.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#29

Post by Angostura »

blatchcorn wrote: post #2

Apple is a 'use all of our products, or else we will make life inconvenient for you' company. The fact that this happens to offer some privacy benefits is just a strategy credit[1] [1] https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/

> 'use all of our products, or else we will make life inconvenient for you' company.

I see them more as the 'use all of our products and we will make life convenient for you' company.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#30

Post by rapsey »

nafizh wrote: post #22

Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. I for one, am happy that Apple can afford to offer privacy as one of its strong suites. Whether they can do it because of their business model or not is moot IMO. Everyone is here to make money, I would rather have someone who doesn't have to sell every aspect of my life to do it.

Trying to sell something to privacy obsessed tech segment is a futile effort. They are never happy and don’t want to pay for anything anyway.

But that is not their target market anyway. It is the general public and these comments are just noise.

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