Well, I’m not surprised. All the megacorps seem to be crap at privacy because privacy interferes with their lucre. So, Apple is just another Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, etc. I know that they advertised otherwise, but that’s a matter for court and truth in advertising laws; personally I’ve always assumed that every phone is a passive surveillance device.
Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
61–70 of 164 posts
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#62Allegedly it’s fine because they’re collecting information for internal use and not sharing with third parties, but really the industry is trying to redefine tracking as cross service/site tracking. Well I think they should set the same bar internally
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows is now entirely an internet service as you need a microsoft account and internet connection to install it.
You don’t, they try to obscure it but you can still install without a Microsoft Account.
And obscuring it in a way that you need to disconnect from the internet for the local account installation to become available.
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#64This "Directory Services Identifier" is not sent outside of Apple's services though right? And only sent to Apple services that need to know the identity of the user? If so I'm wondering what the issue is here.
It seems a little more leaky than I'd expect:
Because that identifier is also used in some iCloud API requests, I also spotted the same value in activity logs for third-party applications using things in my iCloud account, as well as in metadata for local copies of documents I downloaded from my drive at iCloud.com.
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finally, someone puts words on the irks I felt the last times this came up. Thank you. Apple is basically loopholing all the shitty ad-tech engagement surveillance bs that plagues the rest of the industry through the app store, pretending like it's any other app. Of course they can, but a lot of the hard-line privacy stuff goes down the drain with the hypocrisy. What bothers me is that Apple really doesn't have to mo…
> Instead, all mega corps seem to blend together and follow the same playbook. It's sad. Yet another glaring indicator identifying our species as not mature enough to manage our own society. If this occurs everywhere, no matter what, then it is us, our constitution, our chemistry, our maturity as a species that is at fault.
This mental leap is a bridge to far for me to understand. Can you fill in the steps in your logic?
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#66Well, I’m not surprised. All the megacorps seem to be crap at privacy because privacy interferes with their lucre. So, Apple is just another Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, etc. I know that they advertised otherwise, but that’s a matter for court and truth in advertising laws; personally I’ve always assumed that every phone is a passive surveillance device.
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Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#67> I may be getting something wildly wrong here, but I am not sure I see the presence of this Apple ID proxy in Apple’s services logs to be a violation of either its own policies or users’ expectations for using internet services in general. I strongly disagree that the iOS App Store should be treated as an "internet service" rather than a part of the device. The iOS App Store only comes on iOS devices, it comes on al…
"It would be like Microsoft saying "explorer.exe? Policy A only covers the OS, and that is clearly not part of Windows! - so therefore you are covered by Policy B." This made me remember a long time ago when I ran Windows I used to disable explorer.exe by editing a certain registry key. Not sure if this still works today, but it did back then. This reduced distraction as only one window could be maxmized at a time. A…
I remember that back in the windows 95 days i used the same trick to load progman.exe instead of explorer.exe during boot.
I was too used to the Windows 3.1 desktop environment...
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#68Good to see somebody talking sense. Lots of journalists jumped on this, framing Apple as evil. At a high level, the whole thing is no different to a website using a cookie to keep you logged in.
A cookie is not a PII identifier, it is an "identity discriminator". In other words cookies let them tell you the _same_ person 104898 that was already here in March, welcome back!, and not any other person e.g. 298472, but without telling them your actual name etc. In contrast, a PII identifier is a unique ID that is linked to personal attributes in real life like a person's name ("John Doe"), address ("6400 Bouleva…
> VISA 4879 5223 6537 9935
I'm curious where that number came from. It passes the Luhn check so it probably isn't just some random number, and has the right first few digits for Visa but doesn't match any of the Visa test card numbers that I happen to know.
Looking up the issuing bank from the first 6 digits gives inconsistent results. Half of the several BIN lookup sites I tried just say it is from the US. The other half say it is from Blom bank in the country of Lebanon.
Googling it gives me a small number of sites about "unlimited credit card numbers that work 2022" which seem quite shady but I can't quit figure out what the heck that are actually trying to accomplish.
Here are those sites: https://www.financegab.com/credit-card/unlimited-credit-card... and https://paisabank.org/unlimited-credit-card-numbers-that-wor...
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#69Allegedly it’s fine because they’re collecting information for internal use and not sharing with third parties, but really the industry is trying to redefine tracking as cross service/site tracking. Well I think they should set the same bar internally
Why?
What is the value in anonymizing your voluntary engagement within a single corporate entity?
As long as that entity provides me with an accurate reporting of access when I request it?
Why for example would I want to make it any more difficult for my doctor at a hospital and the hospital pharmacy to share my confidential health information to ensure I get the right treatment?
Re: Oh, the Places Your Apple ID Will Go
#70> I may be getting something wildly wrong here, but I am not sure I see the presence of this Apple ID proxy in Apple’s services logs to be a violation of either its own policies or users’ expectations for using internet services in general. I strongly disagree that the iOS App Store should be treated as an "internet service" rather than a part of the device. The iOS App Store only comes on iOS devices, it comes on al…
Devil's advocate: Contrary to explorer.exe, App Store is an internet service in the sense that it requires sending requests to backend for pretty much any user action. There is zero functionality without a data connection.
Uninstall requires a backend? If uninstall doesn't require a backend then it's not an internet service. It's manipulating things on-device.
It's a package manager and tracker designed in such a way that it only talks to Apple's backend.
It's still the system package manager though.