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Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

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Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#221

Post by RandomWorker »

YeBanKo wrote: post #218

Simple fix. Ballot measure to replace the “right to be forgotten” with the “permission to be remembered”, that need to be renewed every, 1-3 years. If companies fails to obtain permission in 3 years, then it must remove your data. Such permission is non transferable, meaning that if you started an account with Good Company, Inc. and it was acquired by Evil Corp, Inc. The latter need to get a new permission under the…

I like it, but what if we train a neural network that remembers all the data in its weights? My sense is that these companies are using large (deep neural network) models to make their recommendation systems work. We can't ask the neural network to selectively forget a person, at least to my ability.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#222

Post by LexGray »

Zambyte wrote: post #207
isodev wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple shows ads for apps in the App Store sans behavioural targeting. If there is a kind of “ethical ads” that’s as close as it gets.

> If there is a kind of “ethical ads” that’s as close as it gets. A news paper ad? A builtin board? I think advertisements that hijack your attention are always unethical. You should have to look for ads to see them.

Isn't looking at an Apple device just like looking at a newspaper? I seem to recall papers being chock full of ads outside the front page to a far greater extent than the Apple News app.

Our society depends on advertising for promoting new services, gaining new customers, and building trust. I would call it a social necessity which makes it very ethical as long as it is truthful. The hijacking that occurs is consensual as you should not visit sites if you disagree with their advertising habits. Even with the App Store almost never open it directly.

The ones that cannot be avoided are in the outside world. I would celebrate if every billboard, postal mail item, and other real world advertisement were banned completely as that is the part I have no direct control over.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#223

Post by toastal »

orf wrote: post #176
toastal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you go the custom ROM + microG option that 98% of folks would never do… or you embrace the Linux phone OS which has no ‘apps’ (like that banking app that banned you for rooting your other Linux (Android) phone) & the telephony barely works if it even does. This duopoly sucks.

It’s telling that you think 98% of users wouldn’t do that. It’s 99.9999% of android users my friend.

Good to know that extra 1.9999% was worth a comment. It’s pretty similar to the number of desktop Linux users even (edit: which seem to be over 3% now actually, great).

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#224

Post by JohnFen »

endisneigh wrote: post #17

If 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…

Personally, I literally cannot think of a tech company that I trust even a little bit.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#225

Post by tomnipotent »

satvikpendem wrote: post #211
tomnipotent wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't make a point. App telemetry is absolutely benign compared to the kind of invasive ad tracking that Facebook participates in. There's no shortage of horror stories of poorly implemented Facebook Pixel integrations passing sensitive user data that marketers then use to create custom ad campaigns. Most recent examples that come to mind: https://www.extremetech.com/internet/341111-tax-filing-websi... https://g…

What is this false dichotomy? Both can be bad, even if one is less bad than the other. It doesn't make either "benign."

> It doesn't make either "benign."

It's literally benign by definition.

    benign
    adjective

    a: of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life 
    b: having no significant effect : harmless
Provide evidence or argument that it's not benign.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#226

Post by MikusR »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #161
kaba0 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, not all ads are the same from an ethical standpoint. Displaying an app ad in the appstore upon searching for a similar term is very different than displaying ads based on your whole life, collected in malicious ways.

I don't own an apple device now but why does app store have ads ? After paying upwards of $1000+ on a iPhone, why can't you expect an ad free experience on a first party app store?

Even settings app on iphones has adds.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#227

Post by GeekyBear »

amelius wrote: post #166
hedora wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the top hit for IDFA (the wikipedia article): > Starting in iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5, users are prompted to decide whether to opt-in or out of IDFA sharing before apps can query it. This choice can be altered in Settings.[2][3] In May, 2021, Verizon-owned advertisement analytics company Flurry Analytics reported that 96% of US users opted out of IDFA sharing.[4]

> 96% of US users opted out of IDFA sharing If it's so clear that users don't want to be tracked online, why don't we just ban it altogether? It would solve a lot of problems.

> why don't we just ban it altogether?

There has been a setting to turn the IDFA completely off for well over a decade.

Previously, apps on iOS or Android had access to the unchanging hardware ID number of the device.

> Apple notes that it will be phasing out access to the unique device identifier, or UDID, on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

This is a big deal, especially for any mobile ad networks, game networks or any app which relies on the UDID to identify users.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-ud...

Apple replaced the hardware ID with a random number (the IDFA) that could be reset by the user at any time, or turned off completely.

Google eventually followed suit, although any app that received the. READ_PHONE_STATE permission was immune to the protections.

> READ_PHONE_STATE is one of the Android permissions categorized as dangerous. This is because it “allows read only access to phone state, including the phone number of the device, current cellular network information, the status of any ongoing calls, and a list of any Phone Accounts registered on the device”.

... it is often requested and misused by other types of applications that do not have any reason for needing it, including malware.

https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-6101658_80235.htm

The recent changes at Apple were to make the IDFA opt out by default and to track the permission to use it per app instead of per device.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#228

Post by satvikpendem »

tomnipotent wrote: post #225
satvikpendem wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this false dichotomy? Both can be bad, even if one is less bad than the other. It doesn't make either "benign."

> It doesn't make either "benign." It's literally benign by definition. benign adjective a: of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life b: having no significant effect : harmless Provide evidence or argument that it's not benign.

All tracking is bad, therefore it's not benign. Benign tracking is no tracking.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#229

Post by epistasis »

amelius wrote: post #208
epistasis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are dollar-for-service inevitably going to switch to ad supported? I can't imagine the necessity of that, you already have a paying customer.

See Smart TVs.

Good point! And I guess that also brings in all the gunk that I hear gets installed on Windows from a lot of systems integrators. Which, funnily enough, has been one of the clear market differentiators for Apple.

Re: Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

#230

Post by GeekyBear »

Draiken wrote: post #163
GeekyBear wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising doesn't require that you relentlessly spy on users, it's just more profitable if you do so.

Then you know what will happen. They will relentlessly spy on their users. This is a for-profit company. It will always do what is more profitable, even if they don't do it right away.

> Then you know what will happen.

There is an interesting lesson you can learn from history: Google Maps vs Apple Maps.

Google set up their system to track each individual's location history forever, even if the user turned off the setting that Google said would stop this behavior. This data can be handy when you're trying to keep map data updated.

However, you don't have to track each user's location constantly to get the benefit.

> “We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.

The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.

Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...

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