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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

#391

Post by xenospn »

maxxxxx wrote: post #381
ballenf wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a core part of their messaging has been that they don't actually know what users are storing inside their cloud, has it not?

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

#393

Post by orbital-decay »

rapsey wrote: post #30
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.

>They are never happy and don’t want to pay for anything anyway.

I'm probably not obsessed with privacy, but I put it fairly high on my priority list, and I'm sure as hell I can and will pay for it, if it's not just an illusion. I can see value when there's value. It remains to be seen whether Apple can provide it, though.

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

#394

Post by Kalium »

scarface74 wrote: post #384
Kalium wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not able to point concretely to any. As I am not possessed of sufficient internal fincancial information to evaluate the question, I am also not equipped to evaluate the question.

I do feel safe in suggesting that across all the apps of the world, there is a greater than 50% chance of there being at least one such application.

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

#395

Post by tibyat »

fyoving wrote: post #217

It'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…

this was not very close to the chronology at all.

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

#396

Post by babypuncher »

dcosson wrote: post #354
tfha wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem that I have is that it's privacy built on a closed source platform that works extremely hard to wall users in and create substantial vendor lock-in. As someone who has tried multiple times to dip their toes into the Apple world, I can tell you that it's highly hostile to users who try to pick and choose how much they want to be an Apple citizen. If you don't agree to sign up for Apple cloud on the…

I've been using iPhone and MacOS for years and successfully picking & choosing different parts of the ecosystem. Sure, the defaults are usually set up to opt you into their own products so it takes a bit of fiddling but it's not hard to opt into just the set of services you want to use - i.e. sync only particular services like iCloud Notes and password manager, but use gmail for email and calendars (using open format…

You lose a lot more than just message bubble colors when you switch away from iMessage. Multimedia quality takes a nosedive to 2006, reactions don't work, you lose encryption (SMS/MMS is not encrypted at all), and you miss out on all the other little things that make people like iMessage.

Of course this isn't really Apple's fault, we can blame the cell carriers for being categorically uninterested in modernizing SMS or making it secure.

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

#397

Post by mirimir »

pwinnski wrote: post #272
mirimir wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 els…

I get that I'm being hard on Apple. And I understand that there's no way to guarantee third-party apps.

But I still maintain that they should have explicitly warned users that installing third-party apps would put their privacy at risk. The situation with Android is undoubtedly far worse. But Google doesn't (at least, not plausibly) claim to be privacy-friendly.

I mean, consider what lengths Apple has gone to to keep customers from rooting their phones. Back in the day, they were bricking them. And they justified it all for security against malicious apps.

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

#398

Post by babypuncher »

maxxxxx wrote: post #381
ballenf wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't Apple prove to the FBI in court that they literally cannot access a users iCloud data without their password?

Obviously that still isn't as trustworthy as open source tools you can verify yourself, but it's a far cry better than any privacy guarantee you're getting from Google.

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

#400

Post by babypuncher »

myself248 wrote: post #340
tfha wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem that I have is that it's privacy built on a closed source platform that works extremely hard to wall users in and create substantial vendor lock-in. As someone who has tried multiple times to dip their toes into the Apple world, I can tell you that it's highly hostile to users who try to pick and choose how much they want to be an Apple citizen. If you don't agree to sign up for Apple cloud on the…

Furthermore, they're based in a jurisdiction that's subject to warrantless blanket subpoenas with zero oversight. They may not be selling our data explicitly to the lowest bidder, but everything they gather is still accessible to whoever sits in the White House and whatever their minions think would be fun to dig up. What makes Apple different is that since their business model doesn't depend on gathering and selling…

Except Apple went to court and proved that they can't hand over this data even if they want to. US law allows law enforcement with a warrant to require Apple to hand over any data they have, but Apple isn't required to help them crack the users password so they can decrypt it.
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