Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#221

Post by byuu » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 10:40 AM UTC

CHY872 wrote: post #166

near wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Mozilla's track record include their suggested advertising tiles on your newtab page, based off your browsing history? Or their defaulting to Yahoo to send your searches because they were the highest bidder? Now yes, they say the tiles are based on your local history and not transmitted anywhere; so it's not as bad (I don't care if other people don't see it, I don't want my data mined even locally for the purpos…

Mozilla's a non-profit - the money it collects goes into supporting additional open-source products. At the moment, it does this on income of $300 million per year (mostly from their search provider). Of this money, $200 million goes on software development, $10 million goes on running their services (downloads, sync etc), and $70 million goes on administration, general costs (buildings etc) and marketing. So yes, if…

> A modern browser engine is millions of lines of highly optimised code long, and that corresponds to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment

Currently Firefox is 12,000,000 LOC, so each line of code costs $25 per year? o_O If so, I am in the wrong business, given my main project is 300,000 lines of my own code.

Now, I totally believe the costs are astronomical to run a web browser team and all the servers required for such a feat. But surely it can't cost nearly this much. Especially with volunteers working on it as a labor of love as with many other major open-source projects, such as Linux.

In my ideal world, access to technology has become so essential that I think it's not unreasonable to consider public funding for things like an operating system and web browser. I do realize this is the worst site possible to suggest such a thing, of course ;) There's countless problems with that idea as well. We'd need a government that didn't spy on its own citizens, and wasn't far more wasteful than the private sector. But a man can dream.

But at this point, I'd be happy with a $1m Kickstarter to develop a fully-featured Webkit-based browser UI that is absolutely by the users, for the users. Taking only their input in mind (no crazy designers that "know better than the users"), no compromises on corporate interests (DRM), and never implementing any form of advertising nor doing any backroom deals with companies that want to mine your data like Google and Yahoo.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#222

Post by stephenr » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 10:42 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #61

stephenr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these companies are in it to win your private information, The companies he Tim Cook described, that offer "free" services and data-mine/aggregate/sell your personal information to fund the business? Yes. Apple has a vested interest in not collecting, analysing, aggregating and using the vast amounts of private information other companies do: they're seen by many as a premium brand, where you pay a bit more and…

> Apple has a vested interest in not collecting, analysing Do you seriously believe that? They are doing this non stop. Not a month goes by without my iPad requesting my iCloud password so it can back up my entire tablet, even though I've repeatedly declined to provide it. They are collecting and analysing PII data all the time. They need it because it's an arms' race. They will only stop if compelled to do so by gov…

> Not a month goes by without my iPad requesting my iCloud password so it can back up my entire tablet, even though I've repeatedly declined to provide it.

Apple prompts you to backup your data... so they must be analysing your data? Can I get whatever brand of space cakes you're snacking on?

> They need it because it's an arms' race

Google/etc are dependant on that information - without it they have almost no revenue at all.

Apple sells physical and digital products, and provides services. Almost all of these cost money to use, and the amount of data personal information required from the customer to provide those services is close to zero.

So tell me again why apple "needs" the data which they have repeatedly said they don't collect and don't want to collect?

> Unless you tell me you never, ever use a search engine

I refer you to https://duckduckgo.com/privacy & http://donttrack.us

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#223

Post by stephenr » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 10:45 AM UTC

aiiane wrote: post #169

anon1385 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of tracking Google does that couldn't just be instantly turned on at the request of a government if Google wasn't already doing it. For example Google Analytics: if that product didn't exist the government couldn't just ask Google to install tracking scripts on half the websites in the world without anybody noticing. You could argue that the government could force Google to create and market Google Ana…

By that argument CDNs shouldn't exist, since the government could theoretically compel them to inject code into the sites they serve.

The correct analogy would be "by that argument, everyone should think very carefully about the pros and cons of using a CDN to serve part/all of their website".

Which.... is true anyway, regardless of the potential for government-enforced data collection.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#224

Post by stephenr » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 10:46 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #50

stephenr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All these companies are in it to win your private information, The companies he Tim Cook described, that offer "free" services and data-mine/aggregate/sell your personal information to fund the business? Yes. Apple has a vested interest in not collecting, analysing, aggregating and using the vast amounts of private information other companies do: they're seen by many as a premium brand, where you pay a bit more and…

Part of that is not getting "maybe you'd like X" emails from the App Store I use a fair variety of google products on a couple of different platforms and have for years. Google has never sent me a suggest-sell email. They don't hide the fact that they're in the advertising and marketing business, but they're not that unsubtle. Perhaps other people get suggest-sell emails from Google, but it's not something I've seen…

> Google has never sent me a suggest-sell email.

Did I say it was Google doing this?

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#225

Post by 72deluxe » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 10:56 AM UTC

hkailahi wrote: post #171

At the moment, this thread seems more like a YouTube comment section than a HN one. Though it's not exactly surprising given that Tim Cook's speech is obviously aimed at Google/FB. Let's start with the facts. Apple makes its major money in hardware. Google makes its major money in search. Obviously, iOS has to be able to compete with Android in order for iPhones to sell well. Google offers services like Google Now an…

It makes me chuckle when you mention this being like a YouTube comment section, thanks! I always found it very sad that the comments section on YouTube is typically chock-full of disgusting insults, profanity and general horrible comments. It should be renamed the "abuse" section instead of "comments". It makes you lose any hope in humanity pulling itself out of the cess pool.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#226

Post by 72deluxe » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:01 AM UTC

etchalon wrote: post #148

davidcgl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So their interests are more aligned with yours. Exactly how does a company that makes money through selling you products have its interests more aligned to yours?

Because that company makes its from me, directly. It has to cater its products to ME, and not to advertisers, or enterprises, or anyone else.

But it is debatable as to whether they really do cater to you. In the end, if they release a product you don't like you have to like it or lump it. The same goes with their software.

There was a significant backlash from when they changed the style in iOS7. They didn't ask you what you wanted. There was also a backlash when they introduced Lion and got rid of "Save As" or got rid of the maximise-equivalent in Yosemite (you have to hold down Alt now, how irritating), or when they removed the Web Sharing option in System Preferences and you have to manually restart Apache etc. etc. etc.

They also removed DVD drives on laptops, never gave us a Bluray drive, stopped us being able to upgrade RAM in laptops and Mac Minis, ditched accelerated graphics for the Mac Mini etc. etc. etc.

The list is quite long of the things that they have changed or removed that you can't do anything about (and it is frequently irritating). As you decide to buy them and are happy with them, you may rationalise this as them making products that cater to you, but in truth they do not.

I say this as a developer who writes software for OSX as my day job btw. It's not an anti-Apple rant - it's more truth.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#227

Post by hrktb » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:01 AM UTC

Aissen wrote: post #208

msellout wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not possible. The insights come from the combination of everyone's data, not the analysis of any individual in isolation.

I'd like to disagree. When Google Now reads my email to track my delivery package number or flight number, it's my data. When it understands that I like sport team X, it's my data. When it knows where I work and live to ask Google servers the weather or how long it would take to go somewhere, still my data used as the request base. When Google(+) Photos auto-tags my photos, still my data, although I'd admit the IA tr…

there is a point though in having as much data as possible for trainig and learning purpose.

Even with a locally installed AI, it will need to be trained on real and up to date data, it needs feedback on what was well recognized and on which data it failed, etc.

the training and update cycle can be done on an individual basis, but having a distributed system sharing a huge set of varied data would accelerate the process exponentially.

Ideally training data shouldn't be stored once it is ingested by yhe AI, but we'd need at least interconnected AIs dharing data from different users

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#228

Post by 72deluxe » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:04 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #194

CHY872 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have full disk encryption enabled, the system won't boot if you don't give it the password. They write it down because you can't expect a tech to remember 16 digits of alphanumeric password for each client, as it looks bad when they have to phone up the client asking what their password is when they forget it. Writing down passwords is bad because other people can find them. If they're kept safe, there's no is…

They can't boot it off a flash drive? I can understand asking for a password to do that, but the system should not be designed so that they need access to the current OS install to diagnose hardware problems.

If only they could hold down Alt when the boot chime noise is made on turn on and select an alternative disk to boot from.....

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#229

Post by erikb » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:05 AM UTC

I've read many highly rated comments that state something on the lines of "Apple sells hardware not ads, so they don't want to collect your data". If we shorten this to " sells " then you already have the foundation of what requires data. Sales and marketing probably eat the biggest amount of money in any company. And they get better and cheaper with more data. That's why Google ads works so well. They can connect the right customers with the right products, because they have the data.

Therefore I'd say everybody wants all data about you they can get, including Apple, because everybody sells. I would guess they'll collect your data and call it privacy because they protect it against third parties, but they themselves wouldn't protect your data from Apple.

It also doesn't make much sense to really protect data. The supermarket in front of my office sells so called "Extra Cards" which advertise to not care about your data because you don't have to enter your name or something. That they still collect what you buy, when you buy, and where you buy they simply don't say and many people are fine with that. Even software developers have this card because they think their data is safe.

It's hip to sell privacy, it's not hip to really offer privacy.

Re: Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy

#230

Post by 72deluxe » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 11:08 AM UTC

ac29 wrote: post #100

MCRed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how Google advocates always "bash" apple for being "closed source" when this company ships the most popular Unix in the world... and all of their products, even the watch, are based on it. Yes, they do keep the Application/UI layer closed source, but so does google ("Google Apps"). Yet google has spend years propagandizing that they are "open" while Apple is "closed" and that plays right into the latent de…

>It's funny how Google advocates always "bash" apple for being "closed source" when this company ships the most popular Unix in the world... and all of their products, even the watch, are based on it. Android ships far more units than OS X/iOS and their derivatives do.

It also makes me laugh that Google is doing Brillo, which is a stripped-down version of Android - surely Linux is enough?

If you remove all the Androidyness from Android, it's Linux which is quite stripped down....

It's like a project that has no purpose.