71–80 of 155 posts
I hope fanboys don't start defending Apple / Google for their privacy measures etc. (esp. Apple) Both platforms are notorious (Apple more so due to its closed nature imo) and defending any is just weird.
Saying that iPhones are secure and private is wishful thinking that benefits nobody but Apple shareholders. There are no doubt some dead journalists and activists that would still be alive today if iPhones truly were secure and/or private.
>In this paper, we present a study of 24k Android and iOS apps from 2020 along several dimensions relating to user privacy. >We find that third-party tracking and the sharing of unique user identifiers was widespread in apps from both ecosystems, even in apps aimed at children. In the children's category, iOS apps used much fewer advertising-related tracking than their Android counterparts, but could more often acces…
How many children have you raised?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways?
> On the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways? US news orgs have a duty (implied by their extra-Constitutional protections) to ferret out NSA misdeeds but editors/journalists find celebs so much more intriguing.
It's tough to diff the privacy between Android and iOS, as an OS. However, as an app ecosystem, it's not tough at all. For example, there is not a single open source email app on iOS which supports GPG email. In the iOS app ecosystem, privacy and FLOSS is an afterthought, since iOS users are more likely to pay for proprietary software. On Android, there are a lot more options, including things like F-Droid which are…
And it doesn’t seem tough to generally diff privacy between the two OSes, as this paper seems to add some contributions.
I hope fanboys don't start defending Apple / Google for their privacy measures etc. (esp. Apple) Both platforms are notorious (Apple more so due to its closed nature imo) and defending any is just weird.
There are objective reasons where Apple is better at privacy.
For example, one of the things that benefits me the most personally:
iCloud Mail aliases versus Gmail aliases: Google exposes your main address at all times:
HeyGuysLookWhoItIs+TotallyNotMe@gmail.com
What even is the fucking point?
iCloud lets you have completely different aliases all forwarded to the same main account which no one else ever has to see.
Look how we selectively choose information and how that is bad for consumers! iOS 14 released anti-tracking features in April of 2021. This article is released at the end of september, almost october, of 2021. Yet, the authors choose to specifically use a version of iOS that was prior to these changes. This is proof enough for me that the authors purposely skewed the data. This skewed data does not reflect reality, a…
Or maybe the date of the publication does not imply that the data and the work was done exactly in the week before, sometimes a study might take more work then a blog post.
Also, this is a preprint, so maybe they do expand on the final pub.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways? US news orgs have a duty (implied by their extra-Constitutional protections) to ferret out NSA misdeeds but editors/journalists find celebs so much more intriguing.
Christ you seem insufferable. Imagine identifying issues in our media but thinking they are “because calebritiez”
I think this study is quite good but it does come with one important caveat: From page 5, "This is before the introduction of Apple's new opt-in mechanism for tracking in 2021. Our dataset therefore reflects privacy in the app ecosystem shortly before this policy change." Personally, I would prefer to see the difference between apps monetized by customers paying directly and apps monetized by advertising. I take for…
https://www.imore.com/apples-anti-tracking-iphone-feature-fu...
This is not my field but one thing that I don't get when looking over the Transparency Matters report [1] is why do some apps have 9 trackers and others have 300 requests? Are they really so different? And are they able to get information that Starbucks didn't with only 3 trackers and 21 requests?
I guess in the end the magnitudes aren't so important but I found the large differences pretty amazing. If nothing else I would think they might want to reduce the amount of data they need to retain, reducing their costs. It seems like there has to be diminishing returns there.
It also shows how much data Google has as they show up on 8 of the 10 apps tracker lists and one can only assume they keep a copy of all that as well.
So perhaps the iOS/Andriod comparison is meaningless anyway as Google knows all about you either way.
[1] https://blog.lockdownprivacy.com/2021/09/22/study-effectiven...
One thing you have to consider when debating i0S versus Android in the context of privacy is: you can have the best of both worlds and own an Android phone and an i0S device (if you can afford that, and I'm aware many citizens in third world countries don't have the luxury of owning two phones). It's like the old Chrome versus Firefox debates that happen every other month now on Hackernews & Reddit. I own a Chromeboo…
How would that not give you the worst of both worlds? You would be tracked by the weakest aspect of both devices.
Any conversation about privacy needs to be centered around the threat model: Worried about state actors? More power to you, but good luck with that. Most people don't have the time, energy or paranoia (justified or not) to figure that out and keep on top of it. Worried about stalker capitalism? Google is eagerly selling your data to the highest bidder = I have zero faith that their OS isn't snarfing up everything it…
What they do do is use your data to decide what adverts to show you.
If they sold your data, they'd risk a rival company buying it and making a better ad network.