Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?
If both are bad, does it matter which is less bad?
Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
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Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?
If both are bad, does it matter which is less bad?
Yes definitely. There are a lot of nuances in privacy. As an example, take the approach to ML and assistants, where Google collects most of everything to train models on their servers, while Apple tries to anonymize things a bit (e.g. their “differential privacy” techniques).
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#13I don’t think a smart phone in your pocket all day with a GPS and microphone that you use as a central hub for all your communications, notes, research and appointments and so forth, can really be considered for its privacy - and it appears thru researching apps on these smartphones the authors have the same conclusion.
Of course they can, the paper just did. Security (which privacy is one subset of) is not binary. Just because it can never be perfect does not mean that it's all equal.
Privacy is absolutely binary and taking a hardline approach is absolutely the proper way to protect your privacy.
You either actively choose to share information (1) or you don’t (0). The article compares who is sharing what to who — sharing info is sharing, period.
A smartphone with all the bells and whistles in 2021 is not private. I stand by my statement, hardline.
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#14It seems like privacy isn't popular enough to enable a third player in the market. I wonder if "cheap" would be popular enough to make a dent. Like someone churning out de-googled AOSP phones cheap enough to attract market share.
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#15I 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.
The difference is, with a good number of Android phones, you can just flash a custom rom without any tracking built in.
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#16It seems like privacy isn't popular enough to enable a third player in the market. I wonder if "cheap" would be popular enough to make a dent. Like someone churning out de-googled AOSP phones cheap enough to attract market share.
The "cheaper" customers you get, the less they demand.
That includes privacy, unfortunately.
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#17It seems like privacy isn't popular enough to enable a third player in the market. I wonder if "cheap" would be popular enough to make a dent. Like someone churning out de-googled AOSP phones cheap enough to attract market share.
You'd likely attract the ire of some 3-letter-agencies long before you found your market. Even low-volume devices like the Pinephone and Librem have come under fire for potentially including hardware backdoors in newer models. It's a game of cat-and-mouse, where the cat has unlimited resources.
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#18I 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.
Why not if one is better than they other? There is fanboyism, which is unproductive and then there’s sober comparison of objective measures of privacy. And I want to know which is better. So as long as someone presents facts that help me make a decision I don’t want to censor them.
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?
You're welcome to say whatever you want, but if you genuinely believe that the NSA gives preferential treatment to anyone from FAANG you're living a fever dream.
On the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways?
Re: Are iPhones Better for Privacy? Comparative Study of iOS and Android Apps
#20Note that this study and the other one from earlier this year predate iOS 14.5, which introduced the “ask not to track” prompt that disables the operating system-provided unique identifier.