I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. I can understand why the public is skeptical, but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a…
I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy - I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. Basically, I can trust specific people if I feel that I know their character, and by proxy I might trust a company that these people have significant control over. Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic levels, and even founders' altruistic motivations tend to fade or get drowned out by the basic profit motives of an increasingly large group of shareholders. At that point, it's not a matter of trusting, it's at best a matter of recognizing if the strategic goals of the company aligns with my interests in specific ways. For example Apple has made a strategic choice to double down on privacy, because invading privacy is not core to their business the way it is to Google and Facebook, so this allows them to gain an edge over their rivals. Great, that's something. That doesn't mean I "trust" Apple the way I would a person - it's more akin to how I'd recognize when a wild animal doesn't view humans as prey, so I'm willing to get relatively close to them without protective equipment. I don't trust them in general, I don't expect them to care about me at all, but I trust them to follow their instinct, which is to not attack me unprovoked.