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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

#271

Post by at-fates-hands »

Loughla wrote: post #238
scarface74 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you get from Are they profitable To you have to make literally all the money or your business is a failure

My assumption is that the OP meant - every company is compared to Apple and Google and Facebook in terms of profit. That the business in question has to make extreme amounts of money to be considered a success, when in reality, if the business is sustainable and marginally profitable, it should be good enough for some cases.

If we're talking about privacy, there seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a companies profits and their willingness to sell your private information. As someone who values my privacy, I prefer smaller, stable companies because I'm more confident they are acting with my best interests in mind; not chasing massive growth and huge profits.

I spend quite a bit of money per month to maintain some semblance of privacy and none of the companies I support are raking in millions in profit every quarter.

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

#272

Post by pwinnski »

mirimir wrote: post #98
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.

Until a month or two ago, I was believing that Apple was committed to protecting its customers' privacy. Sure, it had been caving to the Chinese government. But I accepted that it had to, or stop doing business in China. And then I learned that Apple does not guarantee that apps from its online store respect users' privacy. That rather gives the lie to its commitment to privacy. I mean, it did (along with Google) tak…

Privacy is not all-or-nothing, like a switch. Apple has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with ad companies in which they provide a token for advertisers in exchange for disallowing fingerprinting, and then ad companies abuse that, so they provide a different rotating token and do more to disallow fingerprinting, and then ad companies abuse that, so they clamp down even more, and then ad companies abuse something else, so now they're clamping down even more, and presumably ad companies will figure out still more ways to abuse something, and so on.

There is no such thing as a third-party guarantee that doesn't also disallow useful functionality.

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

#273

Post by Corrado »

I've been an Apple fan for a long time but for the past 10 years or so I've been using more Google products. Well, I think that is changing. Google is proving itself more and more untrustworthy and Apple is moving in the right direction.

For example, I've been using Android phone ever since the second iPhone came out and have been very happy. I signed up for Google Fi as soon as I could and have been rocking a Nexus or Pixel device every since. However, this PaaS push by Apple, and Google's more recent announcements, have pushed me over the edge. I want to get cameras on my home. I want to sign up for things using email. I want to be able to use my personal devices without having to worry that law enforcement can back-door them. I think Apple is the only company that is taking this seriously and can be trusted to do it right.

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

#274

Post by saagarjha »

yholio wrote: post #25

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 a…

> 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

How sure are you about that? Note that there is a stark difference between “reasonably good” and “used by billions of people”, and that both Apple and Google have thousands of engineers paid five figure salaries for years to work on their mobile platforms.

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

#276

Post by the_resistence »

hellofunk wrote: post #169
afpx wrote: post #165

When I was a teen, my uncle, who was an executive at Oracle at the time, yelled at me for admitting on a medical form that I smoked pot. I said, "But, it's confidential, right?". He told me, "It may be confidential now, but it won't always be. Databases are forever." Apple won't be a privacy company in 10 or 20 years.

I think we are living at just the dawn of a long and very privacy obsessed era, that will probably become more intense as the decades pass, and the generations. I don’t see why a company that pounces on this reality now won’t be still successful at it decades from now.

Decentralized zero trust can't come quickly enough. The evil do'ers are afraid but have the upper hand for now.

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

#277

Post by freehunter »

olivermarks wrote: post #88

My cynical side read this as cheap/free = google/android who own your data in return for their services vs expensive = Apple who are selling you some degree of perceived privacy baked into the operating systems of their primarily hardware offerings, which you pay more for.

Are Apple phones really more expensive though? Yes you can get cheaper Android devices, but the hardware that competes against iPhones still costs roughly the same as an iPhone. A Galaxy S10 costs $900, an iPhone XS costs $999.

Cloud storage from Google costs $10/TB, iCloud storage costs $10/TB. Apple Music costs $10/mo for one person, $15 for families. Google Play Music costs $10/mo for one person, $15 for families.

You can get Android phones that are cheaper than iPhones, but that's just a function of Apple not competing in the mid and low end of the market. Comparable phone hardware is comparably priced and comparable services are comparably priced. So in that case it's more of a tradeoff of expensive and selling your data vs expensive and not selling your data.

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

#278

Post by evanriley »

IMTDb wrote: post #205
dewey wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We wanted our customers to subscribe on the web but not using in-app subscriptions. But you can, and that's what a lot of companies including Netflix do?

Netflix offers subscription through the app as well. If you offer those and do not advertise your other channels, you are allowed to publish. The important part here is that you have to offer the same subscriptions at the same price between your web version and your in-app version. But this would require a significant amount of work on our side to support both web and mobile subscription. We do not expect to get any…

> The important part here is that you have to offer the same subscriptions at the same price between your web version and your in-app version.

That can't be true, SoundCloud offers differing prices between their Go+ on their website and app store. $9.99 and $12.99. They even tell you if you sign-up through their website instead of the app store you get a "discount".

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

#279

Post by Kalium »

scarface74 wrote: post #127
banachtarski wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know when I'll believe it? When the un-screw up their app store which vastly incentivizes the development of free-to-use ad-driven apps that prey on user tracking data over premium alternatives. Ad-based revenue has a higher value proposition to developers because it dodges the inane anachronistic 30% tax. "Privacy" first is an utter illusion when the majority of apps approved in this closed ecosystem that ostens…

Developers aren’t doing ad supported apps because of the 30% “tax”. Did software sell with ads when they had to pay physical retail stores 60% for distribution? They do ads because people are too cheap to buy apps.

There might be a more subtle issue at work here. Sales provide one-time revenue, heavily taxed. Ads provide recurring revenue.
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