This article seems to conflate Apple for Meta's privacy violations. Yes, the OS can always make it more difficult to do fingerprinting and the app store could add even more "privacy warnings", but in the end if you use a privacy violating third party app they will always find ways to slurp up all your data. Using this as some kind of argument that Apple doesn't care about privacy is dishonest.
Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
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Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just tech-speak. To the end user these are two separate apps. And Meta definitely has a way of telling which bits of data came from Threads and which from Instragram. They just chose not to make it easy for the user to delete only Threads data.
The point is that your Threads account is your Instagram account. They're not separate.
And yet it isn’t. One is a totally new platform and one already exists. You might use your login from one to enter the other, but they could totally delete just your threads account if they wanted.
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just tech-speak. To the end user these are two separate apps. And Meta definitely has a way of telling which bits of data came from Threads and which from Instragram. They just chose not to make it easy for the user to delete only Threads data.
The point is that your Threads account is your Instagram account. They're not separate.
Does it matter? The "threads bit" isn't set until you click go. They could totally support zeroing that bit back out. Obviously you and I can imagine how that might be super difficult, but it needn't be. More to the point, not everyone would think that way. They just want an "undo".
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#24Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#25Apple does enough for privacy, but Meta is the real a*hole here
What's an "a*hole"? Some kind of graph traversal algorithm?
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just tech-speak. To the end user these are two separate apps. And Meta definitely has a way of telling which bits of data came from Threads and which from Instragram. They just chose not to make it easy for the user to delete only Threads data.
> To the end user these are two separate apps You literally use your Instagram login to create a Threads account.
So, you "create a Threads account", but somehow you can't delete it?
There are thousands of services where you use the account of one service to create the account of another, and you can still delete those accounts.
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#27Privacy blog post. vercel-insights.com, www.google.com, 'Sign up with Google', Join 132,793 people from companies like: Microsoft, Amazon, facebook, Google, Disney
"There it is again. That funny feeling."
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#28You don't expect your health data, financial data and purchase history (does that include anything paid for by Apple pay?) to be shared with Meta just because you are trying out Threads.
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#29I think it's unfair to compare Facebook actively screwing us to Apple not adopting your proposed metric on their product and passively allowing a very popular app in their app store. Not a huge fan of Apple, but they aren't Facebook.
Agree. But the point of the post appears to be to push Apple toward disclosing these bad actors and dark patterns.
Shaming Apple might work. (I think we already know that shaming Meta will have no effect.)
Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy
#30If you want privacy guarantees do not install or use anything connected to the internet. Even HN - with stylometry and a motivated actor it's easy to correlate your username here with any other publicly written text. An even more motivated actor could do this with privately written text (you know, all of those data breaches). Stay offline for your safety. This is obviously unrealistic for many in the modern era. So n…
Unless you’re a public figure with troves of available text to your name, I don’t really buy the idea that stylometry could be used to identify normal folks or even link accounts between platforms. I would need to see some reality compelling evidence. Especially because character limits and different use patterns for different platforms could throw a wrench in things.