Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 488 posts

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

#381

Post by maxxxxx »

ballenf wrote: post #370
maxxxxx wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. They are sitting on more and more data they will be very tempted to use if they can’t hit their growth rates in the future. It would be better if no single entity had that much data.

Isn't Apple one of the few companies going out of their way to keep as much data as possible on-device instead of in the cloud? I agree that shareholders value margins over principles and that could be an issue for companies who do hold a lot of user data.

With the push to more and more iCloud I would assume they have a lot of data but I am not sure.

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

#382

Post by iamnothere »

fastball wrote: post #378
pdimitar wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security researchers aren't exactly Apple's target audience, just saying. Possibly compromising security for everybody just so 0.05% of the users can be happy is not a realistic expectation.

Exactly. A much better idea would be to have "security researcher" phones that Apple could sell to such, which would be rooted and tracked.

How could you verify that these phones run the same setup as regular phones?

The only way to make companies fix bugs which may be difficult to find, expensive to fix, and potentially embarrassing is to make it easy to locate exploits on real hardware. Otherwise the only people with the resources to do this are government-backed entities like NSO Group, Vupen, etc, who somehow always ensure that exploits get into the hands of repressive governments.

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

#383

Post by scarface74 »

ballenf wrote: post #374
scarface74 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Getting 30% less ad revenue means that subscription revenue would look marginally more attractive. Some # of apps would switch to "paid" if the tax applied to ad revenue. And maybe some apps just wouldn't get made at all, if they were already on the margin of profitability.

Most of the most profitable apps on the store are free to play games with loot boxes and in app purchases or subscriptions - and most of those aren’t even accepting purchases on the App Store anymore.

If Apple reduces their “tax” to 15% how would that compensate for not having the ongoing revenue of ad sales?

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

#384

Post by scarface74 »

Kalium wrote: post #373
scarface74 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And would reducing the “tax” - what normal businesses call distribution expenses - to 10% change the equation?

There are doubtless cases where that extra slice of one-off revenue per customer would make all the difference in the world to the business model. At the same time, I suspect that in most cases it would not change the business decisions being made. Recurring revenue matches the financial needs of a business better in most cases.

Which ones? Can you think of one category of apps that would not do recurring revenue ad sales and go to one time purchases?

Honestly I can’t think of one non game app that is ad supported without the option of turning off ads with an in app purchase or subscription.

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

#385

Post by Razengan »

I love this. Apple is one of the only companies (alongside perhaps Mozilla) with the brand muscle to get away with shooing third-party vultures away from a user's implicit information, like the new protections against inferring your location through IP addresses, the option to share your location only once, and enforcing other restrictions like requiring "Sign In With Apple" on all apps that offer Facebook/Google sign-in. [0]

Some developers may balk at giving up all that tasty data, but as a user, this is GREAT.

Regardless of how you feel about Apple on the whole, who else do you think can afford to put their foot down against predatory practices in favor of the user?

[0] https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=06032019j

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

#386

Post by TomVDB »

fyoving wrote: post #330
TomVDB wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that worth remembering when the end result, being privacy conscious is much more important than the reliability of Siri?

Says who? Personally I prefer sophisticated software that works to this ill conceived fear mongering notion of privacy.

We all have our own preferences.

But whatever they are, that still doesn't mean that Apple failure with Siri as alleged reason to focus on privacy is relevant when the end result is better privacy.

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

#387

Post by deviomi »

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…

It's not just the cost of the OS. Orders of magnitude more costly is developing and maintaining the apps. That includes 1st party apps from Google and Apple and 3rd party.

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

#388

Post by orky56 »

damnyou wrote: post #321
yalogin wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arm-twisting? You are conflating two issues here. Every company wants to retain users and their business. That is how every company operates. You should judge a company on what they offer as an incentive to keep them. Privacy as a service on their platform is a great thing. Compare that to what other companies offer as incentives.

One person's incentives are another's abusive vendor lock-in. Each time you use the sign in with Apple button, it becomes ever so harder to switch away from Apple products. Each time your friends add you to an iMessage group chat (instead of, say, a WhatsApp one) it becomes ever so harder to switch away from Apple products. Each time you buy an Apple home speaker or Apple TV or whatever else it becomes harder to swit…

At their size & scale, these tech behemoths want to be your platform and be in between everything. So the question becomes, everything else being equal among them which would you choose and why? Privacy is a good enough reason for me and I'm sure others as well.

Since the beginning, Apple wants to justify its premium by it just works which has allowed novice users to use their Macs and then iPhones and other products. With privacy, it's another one of those "it just works" plus "you don't have to worry about it".

If Apple can tie security to its already high brand equity, it will be and continue to be in a good place in today's fear mongering world. It's always better to sell a pain killer than a vitamin and security is top of mind for consumers now more than ever. If nothing else their advertising campaigns are pushing that education onto consumers.

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

#389

Post by manmal »

smt88 wrote: post #316
yalogin wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arm-twisting? You are conflating two issues here. Every company wants to retain users and their business. That is how every company operates. You should judge a company on what they offer as an incentive to keep them. Privacy as a service on their platform is a great thing. Compare that to what other companies offer as incentives.

> Every company wants to retain users and their business. I think GP's point is that Apple is doing this using lock-in, rather than having the best possible products. If there were multiple app stores for iOS users, you could argue that Apple is behaving just like every other business. But they're not. They're stifling competition to lock their customers in.

Indeed, but which of the big tech companies does not use lock-in as a tool? Android Play Services, Google Photos, Amazon Prime, Facebook platform, any streaming service (library is „lost“ if you stop paying)..

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

#390

Post by r00fus »

pmontra wrote: post #299

In other news "Apple’s privacy reputation at risk with new iTunes class-action lawsuit" > The plaintiffs allege that a third party can purchase a list of iTunes customers based on different demographic requirements, like a list of unmarried people who have a taste for a particular genre of music: > The lawsuit further alleges that the third-party beneficiaries of this listening data match it to other sensitive person…

Their main claim revolves around "iTunes & Pandora data" based on a 3rd party aggregator's claims.

Interesting that they mention Pandora - is that how the data got exfiltrated/aggregated?

All the claims in the suit mention "publicly available information" but the references given don't present actual harm to the class.

It'd be very unlikely to me that this class action goes anywhere.

Post reply on HN