A scathing attack because their business model doesn't depend on privacy, but if Apple is in a business like Google/Facebook, would he still feel icky like this?
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Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
21–30 of 348 posts
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure...
I know people from Apple data-related teams and talk to them a lot. Trust me, they simply don't have what it takes to build good data-heavy software.
I know people from those teams as well. Pretty sure Siri, iTunes Match, iTunes Store, App Store, iMessages, iCloud etc use just a little bit of data so clearly they aren't idiots.
And with the acquisition of the guys from FoundationDB pretty sure they will have at least some skill in high end database engineering.
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#23“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.” This is a great strategy to win the hearts and m…
It's also, more cynically, trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue. I mean, to be fair, Google does this too -- their emphasis on openness with Android, or "the next billion" with the low-cost, low-margin devices they enable are casting their business model as more moral than Apple's -- but advocating for the moral superiority of spending high-end money, as Cook is here, always strikes me as kind of gr…
How do you define "sell"? Adsense and Adwords - can very well be argued as selling the distilled gist mined from troves of data collected from your search history, email, photos, android app usage.
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also, more cynically, trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue. I mean, to be fair, Google does this too -- their emphasis on openness with Android, or "the next billion" with the low-cost, low-margin devices they enable are casting their business model as more moral than Apple's -- but advocating for the moral superiority of spending high-end money, as Cook is here, always strikes me as kind of gr…
I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?
No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#25Software is eating everything, including hardware. If Apple is not capable of doing good software it's doomed. It appears to me that Apple is giving up on software. By software I mean the code that recognize things in my photos in Google Photos or the software that sort the items in my Facebook News Feed. Apple is incapable of doing software like that. At least today. So what they're doing is bashing those who actual…
What are you talking about ? Apple is far more invested in software than ever before and have acquired a lot of software companies over the last couple of years for which we not seen the output of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition... And Apple does have software that does the recommendations for iTunes Store, Apple Store and App Store but I am guessing the billions of money to be made by o…
Also, Apple has had face recognition in Aperture, and probably iPhoto, for many years. Probably around the time that Facebook got it.
Of course people who dislike Apple are unlikely to be using Apple software and wouldn't know this.
Edit after the vote brigade: These are two straight up statements of fact. When you down vote them, you tell me that you're being ideological and you don't care what the facts are.
Alas, Hacker News has always been this way.
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tim's argument is simply that free is not free: google's business model requires them to monetize your pictures, through advertising etc. Apple's business model is to charge you for it.
So why they have an ad network? Why they collect your searches in iOS and OSX? They don't mind doing what Google does on top of premium prices but they can't.
Not sure why they have an ad network probably so they can own the entire end to end stack and take advantage of the growth in mobile advertising.
And they collect your searches on iOS/OSX for Spotlight which is used to implement the web site suggestions features. Easy to switch off.
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?
No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.
I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.
That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me.
Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is.
I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also, more cynically, trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue. I mean, to be fair, Google does this too -- their emphasis on openness with Android, or "the next billion" with the low-cost, low-margin devices they enable are casting their business model as more moral than Apple's -- but advocating for the moral superiority of spending high-end money, as Cook is here, always strikes me as kind of gr…
I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?
No, if they sell your data, the recipient can user it for many purposes, including redistributing. If they use your days to target adds, the external customer can't do anything else with it.
They aren't very similar.
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also, more cynically, trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue. I mean, to be fair, Google does this too -- their emphasis on openness with Android, or "the next billion" with the low-cost, low-margin devices they enable are casting their business model as more moral than Apple's -- but advocating for the moral superiority of spending high-end money, as Cook is here, always strikes me as kind of gr…
I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?
No, it's very different. If I'm concerned about my privacy, I'm concerned about who knows stuff about me.
Google knows a bunch of stuff about their customers inherently (because their customers have all their email on Google servers, do Google searches, etc.), so Google customers have already decided they trust Google with that information.
If Google were selling it, they'd be passing it along to other organizations that users haven't explicitly trusted. That'd be bad. But they don't do that -- they use their information to show you things based on what they know, with targeted ads; that might bother you from an aesthetic/anti-capitalist perspective, but isn't an extra concern from a privacy perspective.
(Interesting fun fact: You know who does actively sell your information? Your bank, for just about any big bank.)
Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy
#30Tim, if we're dumb enough to join your autocratic platform, then we're certainly dumb enough to not care about our personal data.