101–110 of 205 posts
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Are you OK? Everything good at home?
All good at home, thanks for asking. Just pointing out that it's easy to point fingers and criticize. If you really believe in values or a cause then work for it. Right? Both Apple and Signal whom you are criticizing are doing much better for humanity than Zynga.
This is not true. As I have submitted on HN earlier, Apple is using the purchases data to customise ads. https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT208477 You can make a case that the ad targeting is just on App Store, News and Stocks but that is just for now, Apple used to have an ad platform iAd which wasn't that successful, so it was discontinued. Once they milk other revenue streams and are more of a monopolistic power in…
That tweet's been deleted, so it's hard to judge it exactly, but my recollection is that someone else pointed out "payment data" here is just App Store, iTunes, etc purchases. "Apple targets ads on the app store based on previous app store purchases" is, IMO, much less of a privacy invasion than "Facebook targets ads based on your friends list, messages, browsing history, real-life purchases, and other things I can't…
Apple certainly is not shy about collecting biometrics. They have the most complete set of biometrics of the FAANGs. I'm not certain what their motive is.
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The mistake that many people do is requesting a systematic change, and then ignoring the systematic effects of it. Maybe in theory "more stores" sounds like "more good" to you as a consumer. But the large mass of consumers are not in a position to judge things like safety, performance, reliability, sustainability. They're only in position to judge things like "$3 is less than $4". So the systematic effect of multiple…
Except that we already know what that landscape looks like on Android and... it's fine. Everyone still uses the Play Store.
You can attribute this to less trust, or more piracy, more likely both.
In part because of this, Play Store is less funded, and less regulated and has way more malware than the App Store.
Also, despite 13% of known app installs come outside the Play Store, 33% of known malware comes outside the Play Store, clearly confirming that non-Play Store installs are way more likely to be malware than Play Store apps.
So in short, Play Stores gets way less sales, gets way more malware, and there's EVEN MORE malware outside the Play Store.
The situation is not fine at all. All of the effects I mentioned are exhibited by Android's ecosystem.
Of course, we probably have different tolerance for what "fine" is. Maybe you don't care that developers do several times less sales per user on Android than on iOS. Maybe you don't care about the malware, and think you can teach everyone you care about to just "be careful" or something.
But if Android is fine, then Android is all yours. It's the majority of phones. So use that. Why do we HAVE to destroy everything that's different and make it like the rest? Why should iOS be Android? Let Apple do Apple. They're clearly doing something right if their parameters are way better than the Play Store.
Apple is in it for themselves too. Stop falling for this.
I see a bunch of comments talking about how Apple is being self serving and not at all altruistic when they defend our privacy. And my response is - well duh. And this is supposed to be a problem how? Apple wants my money and nothing else. They aren't motivated to protect my privacy out of the goodness of their hearts. I am happy to pay money for more privacy. The fact that they only do this because they want my mone…
> The interesting question to me is, why is it that they are literally the ONLY large tech company that is willing to offer me this tradeoff? Maybe other corporations consider it unethical to charge their customers a premium for a false sense of privacy and security? > Samsung, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft don't sell privacy And neither does Apple, they just sell you on the promise of privacy. The reality i…
What makes Apple different, is the decision to design all their products and services in a way that limits (or avoids all together) collection user information. For example, almost all of the "smarts" of the iPhone are executed on the device, without sending your data like location and pictures to Apple's servers for processing.
Apple also enforces through App Store review that app developers are mindful of user's privacy and every instance where data is collected needs to be explained and properly justified.
Regarding the story about the 128 million infected devices, it was a virus which infected developer Macs, resulting in some apps also including malicious code. No user data was leaked and it seems end-users suffered no ill-effects cf. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/xcodeghost-malware-2015...
Of course, no product and service can be 100% secure forever... hacks and malware happen sometimes. That's when practices like app isolation or sandboxing (which is very strict on the iPhone) and explicitly asking users for permissions (so apps can't just choose to get any sensor telemetry they want) comes into play. If an app has been compromised, then the malware is limited to the permissions already granted to the compromised app. Nothing more.
There's still a huge elephant in the room. How are we supposed to trust Apple, Microsoft or any other tech company when it emerged that they fully cooperated with the NSA and their PRISM program. We have to just assume that's still running. Businesses could keep a lot of secrets from us and they're not transparent or accountable to the public.
It’s basically impossible for an American company to defy the American government. They can try in court but ultimately the government has F-22s and nuclear weapons and Apple does not.
They don't need to use weapons to spy on citizens. The constitutional right to privacy was stripped in the Bush era and it's been open season ever since.
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That tweet's been deleted, so it's hard to judge it exactly, but my recollection is that someone else pointed out "payment data" here is just App Store, iTunes, etc purchases. "Apple targets ads on the app store based on previous app store purchases" is, IMO, much less of a privacy invasion than "Facebook targets ads based on your friends list, messages, browsing history, real-life purchases, and other things I can't…
>Apple's profile of me, I imagine, is much less detailed than Facebook's Apple certainly is not shy about collecting biometrics. They have the most complete set of biometrics of the FAANGs. I'm not certain what their motive is.
While some worry that Apple's the only organization defending privacy, others are attacking it for trying to control its ecosystem (in part so it can defend their users' privacy). That's the world right now.
For what it's worth, I'm one of the people that's doing both. I want the store monopolies to be greatly reduced for my benefit as the consumer - and yes, I will continue to acquire and purchase things through the app store, in general, because I trust their system a lot; BUT, I also applaud them and primarily purchase their hardware because I appreciate their privacy. It's possible to have nuance in these positions.
A lot of folks are aligning Apple's motive to somehow gain advantage in ads business as if they'd able to compete with Google, Amazon or Facebook someday in ads biz. I don't think that is their real motive. I believe Apple's real motive with all these privacy centric features such as ATT, Sign in with Apple, Apple card data not being tracked for targeting etc. is to create a privacy centric moat and platform/ecosyste…
I think you’re right about the privacy moat. But I think it flows from a focus on improved user experience. Ads are terrible for user experience because they slow your browsing, block content from your app, take up space in your start menu and are a malware vector. Once ads are off the table, what else can Apple do?
I see a bunch of comments talking about how Apple is being self serving and not at all altruistic when they defend our privacy. And my response is - well duh. And this is supposed to be a problem how? Apple wants my money and nothing else. They aren't motivated to protect my privacy out of the goodness of their hearts. I am happy to pay money for more privacy. The fact that they only do this because they want my mone…
The willingness to pay big for privacy is a signal that you are an interesting person to track.
There are still countries where being LGBT is a capital crime, where the colour of your skin will be used against you, or where your political affiliations can be used against you.
When governments and societies start to turn against people who are different from them, the mass surveillance and profiling makes it much easier to locate all of these people to round them up.