151–160 of 785 posts
Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy in this case).
Unless it's China in which case they will not care about it!
i simply prefer not to believe anything that any government or any trillion dollar company says about encryption and privacy. Apple: > "We have never heard of PRISM", "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers" https://web.archive.org/web/20130609061546/https://www.culto... ..some things are just not discussed on public forums.
So actually Apple was being honest. They had not heard of PRISM, because that term was only used inside the NSA. And they were not allowing direct government access to their servers, they were responding to FISA warrants.
I do like how Apple has backed themselves into a consumer-protecting hole here. I’m sure they would love to have access to that much conversational data themselves, of which no other company has access to. If Siri ever improves too significantly I’ll get nervous.
The difference is that they make money on hardware and the app stores, not on advertising (they have a small ad product but it's probably closer to a rounding error).
"In 2021, Apple generated 3.7 billion U.S. dollars with its global advertising business." [1]
"Apple’s services business, which includes advertising and subscription revenues, grew 24% year over year last quarter to a record $19.5 billion" "It’s likely that a large share of this category’s growth comes from advertising" [2]
"Apple ad business could reach $6B by 2025, with $4.1B from Search Ads" [3]
For reference, 2023 Q2 revenue from "services" amounted to 20.9B USD, while hardware product sales amounted to 73.9B USD. [4]
We're thus talking about ~4%, not exactly a rounding error.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue...
[2] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/apple-ad-revenue...
[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/15/apple-ad-business...
[4] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY23_Q2_Consolidated_Fin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the big G.
> Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the big G That’s not true. Apple was position itself as being better at security than Microsoft long before Google was selling devices to people. For example: https://youtu.be/VuqZ8AqmLPY
It's debatable whether or not that was true, and even if you believed it it was up for another debate whether that security was by design or because Apple's vanishingly small share of the PC market made it uneconomical to write malware targeting OSX.
This isn't to say that Microsoft was doing security properly back then either, they weren't.
The current conservative government is on its last legs before being banished for at least a decade. It appears they already have their eyes on the lucrative private sector and are willing to vandalise the UK with little thought to public protest.
Labour are even more in favour of this than the tories are. Lib Dems, too. No mainstream party in the UK values your privacy.
> Apple previously withdrew plans for its own CSAM-scanning feature for iCloud Photos, following pushback from customers and human rights groups. Apple’s solution was more privacy-preserving than what is now proposed by the UK government. Preface: I don't have an opinion on one side or the other. Question: what were the arguments lobbied against apple that caused them to withdraw? Also, is CSAM the motivating factor…
One common argument was that bad state actors would get non-CSAM, but still "undesirable" (as defined by the state), material into the database and use it to target dissidents, badthink, etc. (Personally, I think this was an overblown risk, since the plan was for the images to first be reviewed by Apple before being sent to the authorities. Presumably if an Apple employee/contractor saw a photo of, say, Tank Man, the…
I have come to the conclusion that part of corporate combat involves apparent grassroots outrage.
If a system without a wide open backdoor is proven effective it becomes more difficult to argue for a bigger backdoor.
I wonder why the UK legislators not preparing a new regulation mandating every keys to every door and safe having a bypass mechanism for government officials. Behind every door and every locked place there could be child pornography and illicit materials hidden!! Every house, every hotel safe are suspects! Criminal oversight, criminal oversight! (and if they think their reasoning for backdoors into online chat and co…
Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy in this case).
Privacy is a fundamental human right!