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

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

#291

Post by rsynnott » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:26 PM 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.

Settings -> iCloud -> Backup -> switch slider to off.

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

#292

Post by hackuser » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

near wrote: post #129

hackuser wrote: post #53

I'm repeating myself (from other threads) but Mozilla should use this sales pitch. Very few users can evaluate business' privacy practices; they only can trust the business. Due to their non-profit, public good status, their mission, and their track record, nobody could compete with Mozilla on trust. EDIT: I'll add: Certainly the other two leading browser makers couldn't compete, and in mobile platforms only Apple, i…

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…

> Does Mozilla's track record include their suggested advertising tiles on your newtab page, based off your browsing history?

Yes, in fact it enhances Mozilla's reputation (or should): 1) It doesn't compromise your confidentiality because, as you point out, your data never leaves your computer; and 2) They provide a way (and open code) for the whole industry to greatly improve the confidentiality of their advertising.

> I don't want my data mined even locally for the purpose of showing me ads

That's fine, but it's not a confidentiality issue.

> defaulting to Yahoo to send your searches because they were the highest bidder?

Given that there are confidential search vendors, such as DuckDuckGo, I agree that this is a confidentiality issue.

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

#293

Post by justaman » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #6

icpmacdo wrote: post #3

“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…

> ... trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue.

This was the idea behind the famous 1984 commercial. Creating a sense of societal urgency and philosophical crisis.

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

#294

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

CHY872 wrote: post #243

byuu wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 requ…

Mozilla do a lot of work besides Firefox. They have Thunderbird, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Bugzilla, etc etc. Brooks' estimates suggest that cost of development increases with the square of the length of the code. Likewise, a single developer should expect to achieve around 10 lines of code per day on an established codebase. This is about $45 per line of code at SV rates. Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its…

> Mozilla has over a thousand employees on its various projects, and this income is necessary to keep them in work.

Here's a thought experiment - what it Mozilla spun-out a "Firefox foundation" that only worked on Firefox? How many employees & how much funding would that require? I suspect it could get by without the ads and could infact, be kick-started.

Granted, this would not mesh with Mozilla's manifesto, and the other projects would die without the ad-powered money-printer that Firefox is.

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

#295

Post by panglott » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #216

Udo_Schmitz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Make up a name and address and load it with gift cards bought with cash. Done.

Buying gift cards for cash is too insecure. But I do see https://giftoff.com/gift-cards/apple-store for buying Apple Store gift cards with Bitcoins. I'll give it a go. Edit: It seems legitimate: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970780.0

Your needs are such that buying gift cards with cash is not secure/anonymous enough for you, yet it is too painful to use open-source software from outside the App Store?

I would suggest that this may be too small of a market to be commercially viable.

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

#296

Post by Tactic » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #254

amirmc wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "There's only one way to be safe. And that's to collect only minimal amounts of data for minimal apps." No. The only way to be really safe is to go live in a cave, not to have any friends and never go anywhere near any tech ever again. I'm sure you can tell that I don't consider that to be much of an option. It's unhelpful to label 'data collection' as the source of the problem as 'collection' happens everywhere in…

Thank you for posting a well-balanced summary of the situation. I think the biggest difficulty with balancing privacy concerns against other factors -- or even encouraging debate about and awareness of the issues among non-technical friends and family -- is that an item of data is itself neutral. It is how that data is used or combined with other data that may or may not be in any given party's interests. Sometimes t…

Agreed that data is in and of itself neutral. Similar to a gun it is not its use but how it is used that can be detrimental. In fact, this is true of most anything from a pencil to a car.

I think at the core however the issue is not how the data is used but one of ownership and privacy. It is "my" business where I drive. It is "my" business whom I call. It is data about me and my behavior. So to have that information about me used, even if it could be assessed publicly, without any need for consent from me becomes the issue.

License plate readers are tantamount to placing a tail on me. The same with tracking my movements via several CCTV cameras, etc.

Retention just makes the situation worse. Yes, you could approach it with laws of appropriate use of this data but the problem is what about when the laws change. And the data is still there. Similar to how people gave data to Radio Shack years ago to find it now being sold to 3rd parties. Privacy policies are constantly shifting for the companies' best interests. Who can keep track?

The problem is that once the data is collected it is out of your hands. And why the regulations need be at the collection level with strict opt-in requirements as well as the usage and retention level.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:46 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 2:53 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #204

fpgeek wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the strong reaction is because the distinction between Apple and Google is much fuzzier and weaker than Tim Cook (and some commenters here) are trying to make it sound. Apple makes money from device sales. Apple can make more money by using private information (to improve their cloud services, selling the search default to Google, for iAds and so on) - as long as they don't do something with it that makes peo…

> There's a difference here but it's a difference of degree, not kind. True, but what a degree, and the difference matters [1]: - 91% of Apple's income is from hardware. - More that 90% of Google's income is from advertising. There's also a very big difference between trying to understand your customers better so that you can build a better mousetrap, rather than selling their information to third parties, directly o…

Apple and Google both collect user data and send it to the cloud. Why does the degree matter? If it's a matter of principle, don't collect user data at all! Since Apple are collecting data anyway, I guess the reason is not principle.

IMO, the why doesn't affect personal privacy. Pure motives don't count for anything when user data falls into the hands of 3rd parties (through hacks, leaks, or divorce lawyers).

> - 91% of Apple's income is from hardware.

> - More that 90% of Google's income is from advertising.

So, in a nutshell - it's not the collection of data that is bad, but advertising? That's BS. The collection of personal data itself is inherently bad, motives be damned. Apple is no snow-flake as Tim would have you think, they also want to gain a competitive edge from aggregating and mining user data.

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

#299

Post by Aissen » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

prof_hobart wrote: post #246

Aissen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>When it understands that I like sport team X, it's my data It is, but that's pretty useless unless Google also knows so that it can send you the relevant updates. >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. The weather, possibly (although again, it's not much use unless Google know enough to target the local…

I agree about the value Maps/Waze style pooling of information. Also agreed that social (what your contacts like) recommendations might be useful. Leaving aside the possibility of implementing those in a P2P fashion, I'm just saying this is not all there is, and that is in fact a minority of the useful stuff.

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

#300

Post by forgottenpass » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 3:05 PM UTC

prof_hobart wrote: post #246

Aissen wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>When it understands that I like sport team X, it's my data It is, but that's pretty useless unless Google also knows so that it can send you the relevant updates. >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. The weather, possibly (although again, it's not much use unless Google know enough to target the local…

It is, but that's pretty useless unless Google also knows so that it can send you the relevant updates.

It's shortsighted to say that just because (example implementation) my device polls their server for $team, that it is the same as "google knowing" I like $team. The interface does not need to be authenticated, or keep logs. There is just a slippery slope between monitoring for diagnostics and abuse that incremental business value very quickly slides into tying team-specific view counters and a favorite team to my user identifier.