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Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

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131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#131
post #10

The Reuters report on this is much more detailed: https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-slams-metas-numerou... And yes, Meta isn’t denying requesting everything under the sun. Their only retort is Apple’s privacy concerns are anticompetitive excuses. Two things can be true: Apple is only protecting their own interests, and Meta is a terrible would-be guardian of all the data they’re requesting.

> Meta is a terrible would-be guardian of all the data they’re requesting.

Do you have any examples of Meta misusing this sort of data in the last 7 years?

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, at some point users must become comfortable with "pedantic permission dialogs." Users must take responsibility for knowing how software works and the motivations of its creators. Trying to outsource those decisions to corporations and government simply isn't working. Since computer users (I include phone users in that definition) can no longer trust software developers (Apple, Meta, etc.) to be ethicall…

> Users must take responsibility for knowing how software works and the motivations of its creators. This doesn't seem reasonable. Let's try to apply the logic elsewhere: > Patients must take responsibility for knowing how medicine works and motivations of its creators/prescribers. Requiring everyone to have deep technical knowledge about anything they use would prevent everyone from using more than the things they a…

> Patients must take responsibility for knowing how medicine works and motivations of its creators/prescribers.

This is true. If you blindly trust whatever your doctor says, you are going to have a bad time in the current medical system. Doctors are incentivized to push pills because they get kickbacks from the pharma industry. This is pretty well known (https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-prescribe-more-of...)

When it comes to Elective surgeries, perscriptions. etc. you need to do your own research to how these things work and make an informed decision for yourself. Ultimately, if you're an adult, you are responsible for your own body and your own equipment.

It's not a matter of deep technical knowledge, it's shallow technical knowledge and political knowledge of what institutions are trustworthy.

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#133
post #72
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I mean, where does a company get the balls to demand total access like this to the phones, networks and data of every phone in the US? These companies have zero fear of us as a people. (They have zero respect for us as well, but that's another issue.)

I'm not sure how you read the above list and got the impression that meta wanted "total access like this to the phones, networks and data of every phone in the US". "Connectivity to all of a user’s Apple devices" probably means mDNS access for device discovery, rather than root access on all devices or whatever. Same for "Wi-Fi networks and properties". They probably want a list of wifi networks so they can connect t…

“Probably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I’m not sure why Meta deserves the benefit of the doubt with a horrible privacy track record as shown in multiple judicial districts throughout the globe.

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#136
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I would rather we'd kept walled gardens (plural is fine, given that monopolies are also bad) is that I expect such apps will quickly become sideloaded soon after it becomes possible. We shall see — that may simply be a security mindset paranoia on my part.

Anti free choice mindset.

Truly free choice is an illusion; the best we can do is a force of law to keep players from tilting the playing field in their own favour.

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we saw how well this approach worked with the cookie popups post GDPR. It doesn't really work. At this point I feel most people have some idea of how their data is used and sold and if they continue to use Meta apps, its because they think the tradeoff is worth it. There are either no alternatives or strong network effects that make Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp etc a worthwhile choice in many cases and we kn…

The problem with the cookies thing though is that it didn't mandate that websites should work well WITHOUT cookies. The cookie popups aren't bad but often the only option is "necessary cookies". We should have a "no cookies" option, too.

There are necessary cookies for sites to operate. For example, you need a cookie for authentication or a server-side e-commerce basket.

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really the kind of apps people would sideload?

Exactly the type of apps people would sideload. Little things that somehow violate App Store rules abusing APIs, lying about app capability, just being ethically dubious. Use flash to create seizures, nudity people realtime, hack your ex, damage the device, cheat at games, spam your enemies, etc. There is an infinite use case for tiny malicious apps finding malicious or gullible users and with side loading there are…

Android is way more popular in the EU than iPhone, allows sideloading, and I am not aware of these issues being rampant with it ?

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#139
post #82

I think one of my personal issues with allowing Meta to access these private APIs is that they may not take "don't allow" for an answer. I have WhatsApp to talk to some family and I recently disabled allowing all contacts in iOS 18. WhatsApp now has a persistent notification at the top of messages to "Allow All Contacts". If Apple allows users to choose whether or not to give Meta access, and users choose "no", Meta…

> I have WhatsApp to talk to some family and I recently disabled allowing all contacts in iOS 18. WhatsApp now has a persistent notification at the top of messages to "Allow All Contacts". If this is still possible, then Apple fucked up the implementation of this feature, as clearly there should be no way to differentiate not having bothered to fill out a ton of contacts and having limited access for an app to see yo…

> If this is still possible, then Apple fucked up the implementation of this feature, as clearly there should be no way to differentiate not having bothered to fill out a ton of contacts and having limited access for an app to see your contacts

If you only allow a subset of your contact, WhatsApp proceeds to not display contact information for everyone and to disable the whole status feature.

Re: Apple and Meta go to war over interoperability vs. privacy

#140
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the EU can stop them from selling their products to EU customers, since as soon as you’re providing services to EU customers you’re obliged to play by EU rules

>Then the EU can stop them from selling their products to EU customers So you want the EU to play whack-a-mole with fly by night IoT vendors, some of which might be shipping directly from China? Or do you want to fix this with even more regulation, like requiring licenses to import IoT products or whatever?

> So you want the EU to play whack-a-mole with fly by night IoT vendors

Yes

Like they do with other online criminals

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