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The Candid Naivety of Geeks

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Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#41

Post by 9dev »

int_19h wrote: post #33
troupo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor. This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the window, see OpenAI partnership). On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy. The bar is so low as to be non-existent

OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far. The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features t…

That is kind of proving OPs point, though: the differentiating factor isn’t actual privacy, it’s an impression of privacy that you’re sold; the warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re using a superior product because you’re special and this phone is for special people that have important data that needs to be protected, and as a manufacturer of special people devices, Apple obviously takes care of this—because you’re important, duh!

If they can get away with appearing to care about privacy instead of actually doing so, they will. That’s all it takes to look better than Google.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#42

Post by luqtas »

saagarjha wrote: post #40

There’s actually a meta-naivety in geeks where they write stuff like this and then get on the soapbox to shill some random project that is somehow better and that we can actually trust some random service for reasons that fall apart if you apply the exact same scrutiny to them. Really, they’re just smug about being smarter. Let’s take the two advertisements that the author has. I call them advertisements because, des…

so what's your point? rant about the rant?

if Proton or whatever gets behind their mission, people will move on to the next company they can 'humanely can trust'... chosing the best option among all the bad options still is progress

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#44

Post by 9dev »

philo_sophia wrote: post #21
cavisne wrote: post #13

Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar. Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon. Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternative…

Upvote. Employees are the actual enforcement of tech ethics. See Google project maven pushback

Oh wow. Do you really want to die on that hill? Big tech is responsible for a HUGE MOUNTAIN of absolutely hideous shit, destroyed lives and dead people—and you’re telling me that the engineers with a freely adjustable consciousness that built this machinery uphold some sort of ethics? The same guys that created algorithms optimised to glue children to screens for most of the day, driving young people into depression and suicide, and allowing the emergence of „alternative facts“?

And yes, Amazon employee #18447272. You are just as responsible for empowering Bezos to fuck over the WaPo as the rest of them. Employees of big tech corporations are the silent accomplices of the tech oligarchy we’re headed into.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#46

Post by saagarjha »

luqtas wrote: post #42
saagarjha wrote: post #40

There’s actually a meta-naivety in geeks where they write stuff like this and then get on the soapbox to shill some random project that is somehow better and that we can actually trust some random service for reasons that fall apart if you apply the exact same scrutiny to them. Really, they’re just smug about being smarter. Let’s take the two advertisements that the author has. I call them advertisements because, des…

so what's your point? rant about the rant? if Proton or whatever gets behind their mission, people will move on to the next company they can 'humanely can trust'... chosing the best option among all the bad options still is progress

That’s exactly the thing the author is calling people “naive” for.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#47

Post by afc »

thakoppno wrote: post #17
cavisne wrote: post #13

Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar. Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon. Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternative…

> In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl. This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incenti…

The gcreep was a huge wake up call for Google, back in ~2010 when this happened. I can tell you that Google took very drastic action internally as a direct result of this (my estimate is that it spent about 100 engineer years, including some very senior SWEs, in this, though that's just a guess) to make it very unlikely for this (an SRE abusing production access) to ever happen again. I'd still say that one incident in 20+ years is a huge success given the scope.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#48

Post by kbenson »

troupo wrote: post #20
zitterbewegung wrote: post #19

There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of companies and what they can share or remain private in relation to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to have privacy in all of the systems to begin with. Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to improve their products. And since they have no extra motivat…

Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor. This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the window, see OpenAI partnership). On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy. The bar is so low as to be non-existent

> Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor.

> This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit

This is the important thing I'm always trying to note to people that think incentives are enough (as I used to). You can never know what the incentives of the company will be 5, 10, 15 years from now, or whether that company or division will exist or have been sold to some other company.

Incentives based on current conditions only matter for outcomes that don't have ramaifications far into the future. That's definitely not data collection and privacy, where you could find that 10 years worth of collected information about you has been sold at some future date.

And lest anyone think they can predict the stance a company will have on a topic a decade or two later, all I can say is that any example someone can point to of a company that has stayed the course we can easily look at point in history where a series of events could have gone the other way and they would be close to being bought out if not defunct. Even Apple had a period where they were bailed out by investment from Microsoft, and many other large names of that period were gobbled up.

Always keep in mind, Sun was an amazing company with amazing products and engineers that embraced open source and competed with Microsoft in the enterprise market, and eventually after declining they got bought by Oracle.

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#49

Post by luqtas »

saagarjha wrote: post #46
luqtas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what's your point? rant about the rant? if Proton or whatever gets behind their mission, people will move on to the next company they can 'humanely can trust'... chosing the best option among all the bad options still is progress

That’s exactly the thing the author is calling people “naive” for.

so we should remain in silence and just use the most popular because it's a lost game?

Re: The Candid Naivety of Geeks

#50

Post by kbenson »

9dev wrote: post #41
int_19h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far. The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features t…

That is kind of proving OPs point, though: the differentiating factor isn’t actual privacy, it’s an impression of privacy that you’re sold; the warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re using a superior product because you’re special and this phone is for special people that have important data that needs to be protected, and as a manufacturer of special people devices, Apple obviously takes care of this—because you’re importa…

You don't even have to make the argument that Apple is untrustworthy. The stronger argument is that you can't know what Apple will be like in the future, or even if they will still be independent (which seems far fetched since they're so big) or a division that deals with user data won't get sold off with the data even if it's to a respectable company, because that company may eventually sell if to a slightly less respectable company, and repeat.

The risk for PII being utilized nefariously never goes away as long as it exists, so the only same stance is to not allow it to exist in others handle if at all possible. It's the same reason you don't share your banking credentials with your friends. Sure, you might trust them, but you can't know the future, so why even expose yourself to risk you don't have to?

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