I highly doubt apple isnt collecting inform on users of their services, they just aren't letting anybody else access it. Its matter of time before Apple builds something that uses all the info they have collected.
Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
261–270 of 488 posts
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you get on the wrong side of Apple's algorithms, there is zero recourse. I don't follow what you're implying.
I think I understand the GP. Let's say I sign up for an online game using Apple's secure sign in because I don't want to share my information. Some time passes, and I've invested 250 hours into the game, when Apple decides to ban my account for whatever reason (perhaps I've refunded too many apps, maybe the credit card that pays my Apple Music expires, my country gets sanctioned by the US gov. etc.) Apple would, pres…
You can choose to share your email with each developer or not, so if you feel particularly attached to a service you can disable the email obfuscation. Or sign up withouth Apple ID if you know beforehand.
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 30% ... Apple’s angle? ... inclined to think it’s incompetency This 30% number is accurate but hardly all tax. First, companies attempting to compete with Steam have found it costs 12% to 18% to just run a digital store, without all the app review, customer discovery & acquisition, hosting and delivery, and ecosystem integration Apple and Steam are doing, much less human support. Second, just a credit card transact…
That's a very good rebuttal, but it doesn't address the point that the premium apps are forced to shoulder more than their share of the load for operating the app store, right? Would there be some way for Apple to charge apps for tracking or running in-app adds?
They offered an ad service some years back, but their insistence on privacy made their ad service uncompetitive, so it folded.
They've been focused on privacy for a long time, and developers running terrible ads is despite Apple's efforts, not because of them.
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can get a decent used iPhone for under $200. I don’t fault Apple for not making an iPhone cheaper than that.
Try to use it as daily driver. Very difficult.
My daughter is on a £150 6s, the same model I’m using right now, just fine for the last 9 months.
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#265From reading the developer documentation it looks like developers need to implement & maintain Sign In with Apple as a new SSO method: https://developer.apple.com/sign-in-with-apple/ When I read the keynote highlights I assumed Apple were extending the existing (iCloud) Keychain/Safari integration to include username generation, and obfuscated email generation resolving to your iCloud account. Since they implemented…
Ideally, they would work with Solid, a standards based approach to decentralized identity, to provide a general solution, rather than creating yet another new one.
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#266Insanity.... plus hackernews has been posting a ton of Apple propaganda. How rude of you, trading the quality we appreciate for money.
Every body has a price...apparently even hackers and their news/
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 30% ... Apple’s angle? ... inclined to think it’s incompetency This 30% number is accurate but hardly all tax. First, companies attempting to compete with Steam have found it costs 12% to 18% to just run a digital store, without all the app review, customer discovery & acquisition, hosting and delivery, and ecosystem integration Apple and Steam are doing, much less human support. Second, just a credit card transact…
Is it really that hard to deliver a 15Mb .ipa file to someone's iDevice, that Apple needs a 30% cut of every transaction to do so? It's not incredibly difficult to operate a trusted digital app sales ecosystem at all. It's just that there is no competition. If Apple wasn't a monopoly, I have no doubt someone like Amazon could deliver a service that undercut Apple by 90% and deliver the same exact "trusted" ecosystem.
Amazon Appstore exists[0]. It also takes a 30% cut.
As a comment above[1] highlights, it is more expensive than it might seem to operate the ecosystem.
It always seems like one should be able to reproduce a popular service in a weekend, but the details (and scale) are tricky.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002999431 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20093819
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think most EU Advertising Control Boards would verdict that Apple's privacy claims are misleading and therefore against the applicable Advertising Law. I think not. From the horses mouth[1]: Since the directive on unfair commercial practices (2005/29/EC) is in place, the misleading and comparative advertising directive has been applied only to business-to-business (B2B) relations concerning misleading advertising…
Your note seems not relevant to what misleading is. Please elaborate.
It's not relevant to my point, which is just about what the regulator is likely to do: That's been answered.
For what "misleading is", see Article 2 (b) and especially Article 3 of Directive 2006/114/EC.
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I understand the GP. Let's say I sign up for an online game using Apple's secure sign in because I don't want to share my information. Some time passes, and I've invested 250 hours into the game, when Apple decides to ban my account for whatever reason (perhaps I've refunded too many apps, maybe the credit card that pays my Apple Music expires, my country gets sanctioned by the US gov. etc.) Apple would, pres…
Isn’t this just a general SSO problem - I assume the same would happen if someone signs on with Google/Facebook/Twitter and is banned from one of those services? Is the idea here that there’s a higher chance of this account type being banned without recourse because of the number and type of ecosystem interaction points (App Store, subscription services, etc.)?
Unlike Google, where high-profile Twitter shaming is basically the only effective technique for resolving issues, for consumers the Apple stores are a legitimate place to go and complain.
It’s not perfect but on the spectrum of bureaucratic chaos, Apple is a lesser offender.
Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company
#270It's worth remembering that Apple's privacy spin began with people noticing that Siri is a joke and other ML powered functions in Apple's software are not nearly as good as the competition's, so the company line basically became "our software sucks because we don't spy on you" and because tech journalists are predisposed to hate everyone else and really love framing their stories as rivals dueling they gladly adopted…
I love how during the keynote the only real mention of siri was hey we use neural text to speech to improve the sound of the voices, otherwise yeah siri is still a shitshow
that being said... I've had a macbook pro/ipad combo since like 2012 haha...