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Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

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Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#371

Post by xorcist »

asutekku wrote: post #246
galangalalgol wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except now you don't have control over your own device. I don't think they are orthogonal goals. Give me root on my iPhone and I'll switch for the privacy. Leaving gapps off an Android install is becoming crippling.

Why do people actually want to root their phones? What kind of advantage does it give to the general user, who flaunts the fact you can do that on android? What can you do now, increasing the usability of a phone, that you couldn’t without a root? Honest question, because I have absolutely no idea.

Backups, for starters. Personally I value being able to restore the software to a known state in case something happens. Not having any way to back up my data was kind of a deal breaker otherwise.

Firewalling traffic and tunneling also requires root. I believe it is a popular way to block ads and analytics, either with a hosts file or iptables.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#372

Post by vinay_ys »

tfha wrote: post #314
nafizh wrote: post #22

Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. I for one, am happy that Apple can afford to offer privacy as one of its strong suites. Whether they can do it because of their business model or not is moot IMO. Everyone is here to make money, I would rather have someone who doesn't have to sell every aspect of my life to do it.

The biggest problem that I have is that it's privacy built on a closed source platform that works extremely hard to wall users in and create substantial vendor lock-in. As someone who has tried multiple times to dip their toes into the Apple world, I can tell you that it's highly hostile to users who try to pick and choose how much they want to be an Apple citizen. If you don't agree to sign up for Apple cloud on the…

On the surface, compared to Android, iOS is much more secure. It seems they ensure app sandbox is not violated by any app developer. No app can steal another apps data. You can prevent/revoke access to contacts, photos, sms, location, background execution, mobile data to any app from a central place.

They allow 3rd-party apps for doing messaging (replaces iMessage), cloud storage (replaces icloud), firefox (replaces safari), 1password (replaces keychain) – all in a clean and easy way – with no ambiguity or confusion.

But w.r.t end to end encryption claims, we just take them at their word. There is no formal verifiable proof.

Recently we have repeatedly learnt the hard way to not trust corporations at they word.

Without open-source and peer-reviewed cryptographic protocols and verifiable trusted execution models, it is not safe to believe it is truly end to end encrypted and nobody is spying.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#373

Post by Kalium »

scarface74 wrote: post #293
Kalium wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be a more subtle issue at work here. Sales provide one-time revenue, heavily taxed. Ads provide recurring revenue.

And would reducing the “tax” - what normal businesses call distribution expenses - to 10% change the equation?

There are doubtless cases where that extra slice of one-off revenue per customer would make all the difference in the world to the business model.

At the same time, I suspect that in most cases it would not change the business decisions being made. Recurring revenue matches the financial needs of a business better in most cases.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#374

Post by ballenf »

scarface74 wrote: post #127
banachtarski wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know when I'll believe it? When the un-screw up their app store which vastly incentivizes the development of free-to-use ad-driven apps that prey on user tracking data over premium alternatives. Ad-based revenue has a higher value proposition to developers because it dodges the inane anachronistic 30% tax. "Privacy" first is an utter illusion when the majority of apps approved in this closed ecosystem that ostens…

Developers aren’t doing ad supported apps because of the 30% “tax”. Did software sell with ads when they had to pay physical retail stores 60% for distribution? They do ads because people are too cheap to buy apps.

Getting 30% less ad revenue means that subscription revenue would look marginally more attractive. Some # of apps would switch to "paid" if the tax applied to ad revenue. And maybe some apps just wouldn't get made at all, if they were already on the margin of profitability.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#375

Post by afpx »

hellofunk wrote: post #169
afpx wrote: post #165

When I was a teen, my uncle, who was an executive at Oracle at the time, yelled at me for admitting on a medical form that I smoked pot. I said, "But, it's confidential, right?". He told me, "It may be confidential now, but it won't always be. Databases are forever." Apple won't be a privacy company in 10 or 20 years.

I think we are living at just the dawn of a long and very privacy obsessed era, that will probably become more intense as the decades pass, and the generations. I don’t see why a company that pounces on this reality now won’t be still successful at it decades from now.

Because, eventually, Apple will lose revenue, and their shareholders will demand profit. And, Apple will be sitting on a trove of data, or metadata, or predictive models built from that data.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#376

Post by anoncake »

briandear wrote: post #328
anoncake wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the cost of selling an app does not primarily depend on its cost. Size, frequency of updates etc. are a much bigger factor. Them taking a flat 30% is a clear sign Apple is a price-maker and the market doesn't work. And taking 30% for in-app purchases — while forbidding developers from even advertising ways of purchasing that bypass Apple — is just plain anticompetitive.

> while forbidding developers from even advertising ways of purchasing that bypass Apple — is just plain anticompetitive. Let’s say you are at a grocery store, offering free samples of a food, the store allows you to set up in the store however, you don’t want to let the store sell your product because of the distribution fees. While giving out the samples in their store, you tell customers to buy your product from y…

> Nothing prevents you from selling outside the App Store.

Apple does. They aren't 100% successful, sure. But we don't excuse the PRC's Great Firewall because people manage to bypass it either (not that the damage Apple and the PRC do were comparable). An unethical act does not become ethical because you're bad at it.

> You want to be visible to customers in Apple’s store

No, you want to be able to sell at all. Due to Apple's anticompetitive behavior that means selling on Apple's store. Your argument might be valid if Apple had a store but didn't force all Iphone and Ipad users to use it.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#377

Post by hellofunk »

afpx wrote: post #375
hellofunk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are living at just the dawn of a long and very privacy obsessed era, that will probably become more intense as the decades pass, and the generations. I don’t see why a company that pounces on this reality now won’t be still successful at it decades from now.

Because, eventually, Apple will lose revenue, and their shareholders will demand profit. And, Apple will be sitting on a trove of data, or metadata, or predictive models built from that data.

That sounds speculative. Why will they lose revenue eventually? Do you think 40 years from now they will be in a worse position than today? After all, they are today in a better position than 40 years ago. Perhaps a privacy-focused company will actually perform better in a society obsessed with privacy, and eventually, their competitors who don't share these perspectives will be the ones that lose revenue.

All we can do is speculate.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#378

Post by fastball »

pdimitar wrote: post #303
iamnothere wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to root the device is pretty important for security research. It's much harder to do an in-depth analysis of a system without root access. Apple products have had plenty of bugs leading to security issues, and I'd rather make it easier for researchers to discover these.

Security researchers aren't exactly Apple's target audience, just saying. Possibly compromising security for everybody just so 0.05% of the users can be happy is not a realistic expectation.

Exactly. A much better idea would be to have "security researcher" phones that Apple could sell to such, which would be rooted and tracked.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#379

Post by kevin_b_er »

Talyen42 wrote: post #155
IMTDb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are a B2B SAAS company offering analytics and marketing data. We wanted to offer our customer the ability to have a free app to interact with our service on their phone. We wanted our customers to subscribe on the web but not using in-app subscriptions. We are unable to release this app on the AppStore until we change our whole payment/subscription/billing stack to support Apple subscription system and agree to gi…

This is not true. Using apple's in-app billing system is optional. You can always keep your billing entirely out of your free app.

You just can't link to your own website or have any flow that could lead to a billing system that isn't apples. "always" is a farce to that end.

Re: Apple is now a privacy-as-a-service company

#380

Post by donarb »

tty2300 wrote: post #89
mqbqi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also they didn't hack iCloud, they hacked the accounts of those users.

Which most likely means someone downloaded a leaked database of another website and logged in to icloud because everyone reuses passwords.

No, they were able to hack accounts by knowing personal details about celebrities and guessing the passwords.
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