12 ms·

The most persuasive argument for Apple as trustworthy on privacy was weak: that because they didn’t monetize data as rapaciously as Google or Meta, there was l

The most persuasive argument for Apple as trustworthy on privacy was weak: that because they didn’t monetize data as rapaciously as Google or Meta, there was less incentive for them to spy on users. But once they introduced new privacy controls, they seemed to suddenly start investing more seriously in their own advertising network. That, and the encryption slight-of-hand with iCloud, makes the cynic’s case for them. App telemetry, metrics, etc might get handwaved away with a sinister phrase, like “essential for improving user experience.” But placing trust in a company on privacy due to the relative lack of financial incentive seems hopelessly naive.

gw98 4y ago
Yeah this one has pissed me off generally. I'm slowly working out how the hell I get out of the ecosystem but I realise I'm heavily locked in and it's difficult so I'm going to have to do it very slowly and methodically. Edit: just bought a desktop PC off ebay which I will install Ubuntu on and see how I get on.
- cowtools 4y ago
  not trying to start a distro war, but I would advise against using ubuntu for the time being as their custodian has been somewhat incompetent in recent years, and they have been forcing users to use their "snap" system. It may give you a bad first experience.
  - ksidudwbw 4y ago
    this path has been partially trodden, elementaryOS. The first versions were snappy don't know now.
  - gw98 4y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. Have dealt with snap before (and eviserated it)
    - adra 4y ago
      I haven't tried it, but I've heard Pop_OS! is a pretty popular distro these days. If you want something really lean and unobtrusive (though you may need more up front setup), you may want to look at an XFCE based distro (my personal favorite). Just remember, most distros have live usb stick distros so you can always try out a bunch before you decide on the right one for yourself.
      - gw98 4y ago
        Thanks. Pop_OS! is a candidate for testing here already if Ubuntu doesn't work out. I picked Ubuntu as a first point because I grabbed a Lenovo Neo 50s desktop and that supports it out of the box. That will set expectation for hardware compatibility and issues for other distributions or variants.
      - jzb 4y ago
        I like Fedora and Pop_OS! I'd recommend Pop_OS! first for newcomers but Fedora is great for a work desktop if you're reasonably technical and don't mind upgrading at least once a year. Pop_OS! offers an LTS edition so you can stay with a release for several years.
  - beckingz 4y ago
    What distro would you suggest as a user friendly alternative?
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      OpenSUSE is nice. It has btrfs/snapper configured by default, which makes upgrades low-stress (if anything ever goes wrong, just reboot into the snapshot automatically created before every upgrade.) It also has a decent GUI (YaST) for system administration tasks.
      - behnamoh 4y ago
        I love OpenSUSE (esp. Tumbleweed), but every time I see a tutorial about ML stuff, they are using Ubuntu. I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu that other distros don't have (e.g., having some libraries preinstalled, sane default configs, etc.)
        quesera 4y ago
        > I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu No advantage, but Ubuntu is the most popular distro for regular users / tutorial customers. Ubuntu also has the widest availability of support resources, even though the information is often not Ubuntu-specific. If you use a non-Ubuntu (or non-Debian-derived) distro, you'll need to do a little bit of package-name mapping to get the prerequisites installed. This is annoying but only has to be done once (take notes!). The bigger problem I've had with ML libs is that they're very picky about version compatibilities. Once you settle on a set of working/compatible versions (libs, python, python pkgs), make some effort to preserve your sources. Package versions can get deleted from the official repos, be prepared to build from source, etc.
    - Ruthalas 4y ago
      Linux Mint has been a good, reliable option for me.
      - viridian 4y ago
- tomrod 4y ago
  At least when I de-appled in 2016, the local info database was accessible for things like MP3 ID info, but it required mapping w/ Python. Moving over to local PC storage was simple through USB (Ubuntu or Fedora as OS at that point, no doubt). I don't know if it is as simple or if they have data checkout options. Good luck with it!
  - gw98 4y ago
    Oh I'm screwed. I'm fully in on Apple Photos, Music, Calendars, Notes, the lot. I will pull things out carefully one service at a time over the space of a few months or I'll get pissed off and give up. One thing I am looking forward to is a keyboard that isn't shit.
    - gopher_space 4y ago
      You’re trading shitty keyboards for shitty trackpads, if that matters.
      - gw98 4y ago
        I've got a nice mouse already (Logitech MX Master 3). I don't use a touchpad if I can help it.
      - dividedbyzero 4y ago
        The new designs have really good keyboards, better than the pre-butterfly ones IMO.
        gw98 4y ago
        I have a 14" M1 MacBook Pro. The keyboard is "ok" but not great. It occasionally misses keypresses when I'm typing fast or hit the edge of a key. Also I never really got on with the keyboard layout. Some things are just better on other platforms like position of hash, usage of meta-keys and discoverability. I find, despite rarely using it, that I can navigate around windows 10 better on a keyboard than I can on a mac. I mostly use my mac in "desktop mode" with an Apple studio display (that's the most difficult thing to give up) and a TKL Durgod K320 cherry MX red mechanical keyboard so I will reuse the keyboard for "the other platform"
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > I'm heavily locked in You should be able to download the music you bought from iTunes DRM free. For the movies/etc, just pirate them. You already "bought" them so morally you're in the clear. For the software/etc, walk away from it. Sunk costs.
  - gw98 4y ago
    I have little software investment (mostly pixelmator) but I am using Apple Music subscription. I've paid for it for over 3 years so I think I've paid enough anyway...
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    The hard part is if you have a lot of content on icloud. Ive yet to find a reliable way to pull content from icloud locally. Apples first party download service doesnt really work for large icloud accounts, the downloads just fail to complete and you have tens or hundreds of gb to download. Ive tried third party command line tools and they silently crash after a couple dozen files, as in they will just hang until I notice they have failed so I cant just automate something to restart the script after fail. I’m actually at a loss here how to migrate from icloud.
    - gw98 4y ago
      Mine is entirely sync'ed to my mac. I just literally run iCloud off and I have everything local.
      - withinboredom 4y ago
        So you have to buy a Mac to get your files?
        gw98 4y ago
        I already have a Mac. I'm trying to get rid of it. You can download icloud for windows as well. And slowly download shit off the web UI.
- kornhole 4y ago
  I sympathize. It is probably the most difficult ecosystem to get out of. Nextcloud was one of the most important pieces of software for some I know who got off of Apple. You can setup your own private cloud or use a community server you trust to replace pretty much everything on Icloud: Files, photos, music, notes, tasks, contacts, calendar, passwords, bookmarks, facetime, and many more. Migrate everything there, and then you can switch to any operating systems you want.
- jxramos 4y ago
  I've been passively looking for a means to get my Notes in some offline format. So far I've just been exporting them to PDF which isn't ideal for me, but at least captures the note more or less.
  - gw98 4y ago
    I just spent the evening turning mine into text files. Turns out I don't have any pictures worth keeping in them.
  - andelink 4y ago
    You can convert notes to markdown or html using AppleScript and/or the Shortcuts app
pfortuny 4y ago
The existence of siri “as it is” (sending the audio/message to Apple) is the proof that they do monetize your data. Siri is not free…
whatever1 4y ago
Facebook was one of the first big companies to implement https in a non-payment / checkout page. They also have not suffered a data breach as far as I can remember. So your data is safe with Facebook too. The only difference that I see between Apple and Facebook is that Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device, while Facebook does it on the cloud. At the end the result is the same: targeted ads to specific classes of users.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Facebook has had several high profile data breaches, 530 million users' data in an unsecured database in 2019, and several issues surrounding data sharing with third party apps on their platform.
- lapser 4y ago
  > Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device Do you have a source for this?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidentifiermanager/1614151-advertisingidentifier https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti... Android has one too: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/ads/identifier/AdvertisingIdClient https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/ads/identif...
    - lapser 4y ago
      That's a device specific identifier. That's not labelling users on device.
  - whatever1 4y ago
    I just opened Apple News, it has a for you page and it shows me articles that are interesting to me (tech and cars), and a nice ad below them for cheap car loans. How did the Apple server know what articles to serve me? I never asked for them explicitly. So I was labeled as a user that likes tech news and cars, and the server automatically sends me stuff relevant (articles & ads) to these labels.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
FWIW the slight of hand mentioned here isn’t in the article. I presume it means the fact iCloud backups aren’t end to end encrypted with your iCloud Keychain passphrase, which was reportedly either: A) because apple wanted to be sure you could restore a device to which you lost the key (not implausible user experience story, but one you could imagine folks opting into) B) the FBI complained and they caved C) both A and B
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Note that iCloud backups include the keys needed to decode your ostensibly end-to-end encrypted iMessage history. Effectively key escrow, but they don't market it like that.
  - dkonofalski 4y ago
    Is there an example of this resulting in a security breach or unauthorized access to someone's iCloud data or iMessage history?
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      That seems like a bad way to think about security threats. The fact that the door is open at all is severely problematic, regardless of how many people have walked through it.
      - dkonofalski 4y ago
        That wasn't my point. The OP suggested that Apple was being deceitful about its position that this posture is "for users". To me, the fact that a user can potentially (and accidentally) lock themselves out of their own data with no recourse is a justification for a more relaxed security posture that completely lines up with being "for users". If there is no evidence of a security breach as a result of this lowered posture, then the lowered posture is both "for users" and also worth it. I, personally, would rather have the higher security posture but I can't see any way for Apple to implement that that wouldn't result in someone's grandparent unintentionally locking themselves out of years worth of data. I already see it when people don't backup their phones (to iCloud, since it's so easy) and then lose all their data when they drop their phone and it gets run over by a car. Apple must see the trade-off as worthwhile to be able to offer users the ability to gain access to their data after an extensive verification process vs. having the strongest security posture possible.
justapassenger 4y ago
Controversial statement - with the amount of scrutiny, hate and FTC oversight over companies like Facebook I have more trust in their privacy than Apple. Apple weaponized privacy to be able to enter their competitors market, all while very openly lying it’s all about the user.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  How is Apple lying that it's all about the user? Their support documents clearly outline what is E2E encrypted and their explicit justification for not locking iCloud backups is specifically because of situations where users are locked out of all their information because of a forgotten password. Unless there's evidence that Apple has sustained a security breach as a result of this posture, it seems to me that they actually are caring about the user. The only incidents that I'm aware of with regard to Apple are social engineering and brute-forcing due to weak user passwords. Is there a situation or evidence that Apple is lying here?
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    "Lying" may be a little extreme. Deceptive, though, perhaps. 1. "We care about your privacy" 2. Introduce a bunch of privacy tracking controls to restrict what other parties and apps can retrieve and use vis-a-vis data and you. 3. Heavily increase your investment in your own ad network that is not subject to the same restrictions.
    - agd 4y ago
      Could you be specific about what tracking restrictions Apple imposes on others which they don’t follow themselves? My understanding was that Apple asks for user consent before letting ad networks track users across many apps run by different companies. Apple doesn’t do that themselves as far as I know?
    - dkonofalski 4y ago
      1. It seems to me that they do care about user privacy. I haven't seen any evidence yet to suggest that they don't. Tim Cook, of all people, has every reason for this to be a priority and a truthful statement. 2. The privacy tracking controls only restrict tracking across apps and websites. Individual apps are allowed to collect data and it would be impossible for Apple to guarantee that an app couldn't collect data since they clearly can't be aware of every since implementation within the app. Notice what the terms for end-users explicitly state since a company like Meta can't get info from Apple about users across FB and Insta, for example, but may have ways to tie users together based on data they're collecting on the platform itself. Apple can't really stop that. They can only make it more difficult (which they have, as evidence by FB's reaction to the new privacy controls). 3. Where do you get the idea that they're not subject to the same restrictions? I don't see any evidence that this is the case.
winter_blue 4y ago
> But once they introduced new privacy controls, they seemed to suddenly start investing more seriously in their own advertising network. That, and the encryption slight-of-hand with iCloud, makes the cynic’s case for them. This might about as clear-cut a case of unfair trade practices as there ever was.
ninth_ant 4y ago
> App telemetry, metrics, etc might get handwaved away with a sinister phrase, like “essential for improving user experience.” I don't get why these are automatically considered sinister. Measuring how people actually behave is an excellent way to improve your product. If this is done with sufficient care and anonymity, with no financial incentive to betray the user, I don't see the issue at all.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Because historically it hasn’t been 99% of the time. And no one cares about securing other people’s data.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  I'm confused about this entire thread and the lawsuit considering that, as far as I can see, Apple's privacy statement explicitly says "across apps or websites". There's nothing about the privacy policy that states that they can't track you within a single app. I don't see any evidence, in the video or otherwise, that what's going on and what's shown is going against that policy. Maybe I'm naive to think that Apple doesn't cross-pollinate this data but I don't see any evidence to suggest that that's not the case or that any of this is malicious.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  To me it's an issue of consent. And not the "agree to us collecting everything or GTFO" kind of consent that companies love to stick in their EULAs. Telemetry is fine as long as I have the option to disable it completely. If that option does not exist, my assumption is that there is a revenue-generating reason why this stuff is being collected and it's not just being used to "improve user experience".
- ridgered4 4y ago
  > If this is done with sufficient care and anonymity, with no financial incentive to betray the user, I don't see the issue at all. Even if a public company somehow managed to pass all of those caveats today the moment their leadership changed it would all go back out the window. And even a private company might go public or change leadership.
dkonofalski 4y ago
I think you're missing a key difference here, though: Apple is not selling that data to their advertisers. The key difference between Apple's privacy argument and others is that your data in the latter case is being sold to those advertisers along with the targeting. Apple, on the other hand, is using your data to personalize what you see but none of that information is sent to Apple and none of it is sold to third parties. All the personalization is being done on your devices and you can turn it off if you choose to so that you just see generic advertisements that everyone else sees. All together, I don't see how that makes Apple's trustworthiness weak in this space. In the current state of the internet, advertisement runs everything so they're still delivering on ads to their customers without selling your data or even giving those third parties a way to track you as an individual. That, to me, still equals privacy, at least as far as what Apple is saying.
- FireBeyond 4y ago
  If this is true I'd be genuinely surprised. Are you saying Apple's model is "Advertise through us. You'll get absolutely no feedback on the users who respond to your advertising. We will just send you a bill, 'x clicks * y cents/click'." Without arguing about whether it should or shouldn't be and the other deeper considerations, I can't see that as a compelling use of marketing dollars.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    There’s probably something to be said for targeting simply the group of people who are on apple devices, given they as a group tend to have higher disposable income. Marketers did their work without direct metrics for a long time, it’s not impossible. Apple would undoubtably not be able to charge as much as they could if they had those sorts of metrics to give, but there is a value proposition there.
  - dkonofalski 4y ago
    No, I'm saying that Apple is promising advertisers aggregated data about their ad performance and people reached without ever handing over individualized data. Apple, like they do with all of their third-party services, is acting as the gatekeeper between users and advertisers/third parties. They're leveraging user trust in their brand/company to say "we'll provide you with data" to advertisers while being able to tell users "we don't share your individual data with third parties". It's the same reason they insist on Apple Pay being the only method of payment for apps within the app store. They don't want to lose user trust by allowing apps to collect payment information from users. Some people think they're doing it to take advantage of their position as the device manufacturer (not a stretch, in my opinion) but I think their consistency across all devices and platforms makes the argument that they are actually doing what they're claiming for the reasons they're stating.
brundolf 4y ago
Imo incentives-based reasoning is the only way of thinking about corporate behavior that isn't naive. What's happened here is that the incentives changed, which- maybe you could call it naive to assume they wouldn't But there's also a bias, when presented with only two real options, of telling yourself that the less-bad option isn't just less-bad, it's actually good. Because it helps you sleep better at night and because there's nothing you could really do about it anyway. Same thing happens with two-party politics
- kbenson 4y ago
  > which- maybe you could call it naive to assume they wouldn't Definitely. I think the correct way to think about public corporate behavior is as if they're psychopaths. I don't mean that necessarily with the negative popular culture connotations, but just that they will always behave in what they see as the optimal personal benefit regardless of what it does to others. That's just what a large and for the most part anonymous ownership that expects growth coupled with a set of people to steer operations that is mandated to work in the best interest of those owners results in. So, think about your relationship with companies as you would with a friend you suspect is a psychopath but is amiable and somewhat beneficial to associate with at the moment. Just because they don't have an incentive to spread all your private info around at the moment doesn't mean they won't have reason to later, so be careful what you expose, and trust them only as far as it makes sense to. They aren't a real friend, you're just using each other for mutual benefit, and that doesn't generally last forever.
summerlight 4y ago
Apple always wanted to get into ads business, but the contenders were too strong and Apple doesn't have an edge for competition unlike Google Search, Amazon Marketplace, Facebook's user tracking etc... So instead of directly jumping into the business they decided to first level the ground with IDFA and ITP. The natural next step would be to monopolize user tracking data within the Apple ecosystem. I'm almost sure that this is "Manifest destiny" for Apple, but the question is "when".

gw98 4y ago

Yeah this one has pissed me off generally. I'm slowly working out how the hell I get out of the ecosystem but I realise I'm heavily locked in and it's difficult so I'm going to have to do it very slowly and methodically. Edit: just bought a desktop PC off ebay which I will install Ubuntu on and see how I get on.

cowtools 4y ago
not trying to start a distro war, but I would advise against using ubuntu for the time being as their custodian has been somewhat incompetent in recent years, and they have been forcing users to use their "snap" system. It may give you a bad first experience.
- ksidudwbw 4y ago
  this path has been partially trodden, elementaryOS. The first versions were snappy don't know now.
- gw98 4y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. Have dealt with snap before (and eviserated it)
  - adra 4y ago
    I haven't tried it, but I've heard Pop_OS! is a pretty popular distro these days. If you want something really lean and unobtrusive (though you may need more up front setup), you may want to look at an XFCE based distro (my personal favorite). Just remember, most distros have live usb stick distros so you can always try out a bunch before you decide on the right one for yourself.
    - gw98 4y ago
      Thanks. Pop_OS! is a candidate for testing here already if Ubuntu doesn't work out. I picked Ubuntu as a first point because I grabbed a Lenovo Neo 50s desktop and that supports it out of the box. That will set expectation for hardware compatibility and issues for other distributions or variants.
    - jzb 4y ago
      I like Fedora and Pop_OS! I'd recommend Pop_OS! first for newcomers but Fedora is great for a work desktop if you're reasonably technical and don't mind upgrading at least once a year. Pop_OS! offers an LTS edition so you can stay with a release for several years.
- beckingz 4y ago
  What distro would you suggest as a user friendly alternative?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    OpenSUSE is nice. It has btrfs/snapper configured by default, which makes upgrades low-stress (if anything ever goes wrong, just reboot into the snapshot automatically created before every upgrade.) It also has a decent GUI (YaST) for system administration tasks.
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      I love OpenSUSE (esp. Tumbleweed), but every time I see a tutorial about ML stuff, they are using Ubuntu. I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu that other distros don't have (e.g., having some libraries preinstalled, sane default configs, etc.)
      - quesera 4y ago
        > I wonder if there's any inherent advantage to Ubuntu No advantage, but Ubuntu is the most popular distro for regular users / tutorial customers. Ubuntu also has the widest availability of support resources, even though the information is often not Ubuntu-specific. If you use a non-Ubuntu (or non-Debian-derived) distro, you'll need to do a little bit of package-name mapping to get the prerequisites installed. This is annoying but only has to be done once (take notes!). The bigger problem I've had with ML libs is that they're very picky about version compatibilities. Once you settle on a set of working/compatible versions (libs, python, python pkgs), make some effort to preserve your sources. Package versions can get deleted from the official repos, be prepared to build from source, etc.
  - Ruthalas 4y ago
    Linux Mint has been a good, reliable option for me.
    - viridian 4y ago
tomrod 4y ago
At least when I de-appled in 2016, the local info database was accessible for things like MP3 ID info, but it required mapping w/ Python. Moving over to local PC storage was simple through USB (Ubuntu or Fedora as OS at that point, no doubt). I don't know if it is as simple or if they have data checkout options. Good luck with it!
- gw98 4y ago
  Oh I'm screwed. I'm fully in on Apple Photos, Music, Calendars, Notes, the lot. I will pull things out carefully one service at a time over the space of a few months or I'll get pissed off and give up. One thing I am looking forward to is a keyboard that isn't shit.
  - gopher_space 4y ago
    You’re trading shitty keyboards for shitty trackpads, if that matters.
    - gw98 4y ago
      I've got a nice mouse already (Logitech MX Master 3). I don't use a touchpad if I can help it.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      The new designs have really good keyboards, better than the pre-butterfly ones IMO.
      - gw98 4y ago
        I have a 14" M1 MacBook Pro. The keyboard is "ok" but not great. It occasionally misses keypresses when I'm typing fast or hit the edge of a key. Also I never really got on with the keyboard layout. Some things are just better on other platforms like position of hash, usage of meta-keys and discoverability. I find, despite rarely using it, that I can navigate around windows 10 better on a keyboard than I can on a mac. I mostly use my mac in "desktop mode" with an Apple studio display (that's the most difficult thing to give up) and a TKL Durgod K320 cherry MX red mechanical keyboard so I will reuse the keyboard for "the other platform"
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> I'm heavily locked in You should be able to download the music you bought from iTunes DRM free. For the movies/etc, just pirate them. You already "bought" them so morally you're in the clear. For the software/etc, walk away from it. Sunk costs.
- gw98 4y ago
  I have little software investment (mostly pixelmator) but I am using Apple Music subscription. I've paid for it for over 3 years so I think I've paid enough anyway...
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  The hard part is if you have a lot of content on icloud. Ive yet to find a reliable way to pull content from icloud locally. Apples first party download service doesnt really work for large icloud accounts, the downloads just fail to complete and you have tens or hundreds of gb to download. Ive tried third party command line tools and they silently crash after a couple dozen files, as in they will just hang until I notice they have failed so I cant just automate something to restart the script after fail. I’m actually at a loss here how to migrate from icloud.
  - gw98 4y ago
    Mine is entirely sync'ed to my mac. I just literally run iCloud off and I have everything local.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      So you have to buy a Mac to get your files?
      - gw98 4y ago
        I already have a Mac. I'm trying to get rid of it. You can download icloud for windows as well. And slowly download shit off the web UI.
kornhole 4y ago
I sympathize. It is probably the most difficult ecosystem to get out of. Nextcloud was one of the most important pieces of software for some I know who got off of Apple. You can setup your own private cloud or use a community server you trust to replace pretty much everything on Icloud: Files, photos, music, notes, tasks, contacts, calendar, passwords, bookmarks, facetime, and many more. Migrate everything there, and then you can switch to any operating systems you want.
jxramos 4y ago
I've been passively looking for a means to get my Notes in some offline format. So far I've just been exporting them to PDF which isn't ideal for me, but at least captures the note more or less.
- gw98 4y ago
  I just spent the evening turning mine into text files. Turns out I don't have any pictures worth keeping in them.
- andelink 4y ago
  You can convert notes to markdown or html using AppleScript and/or the Shortcuts app

pfortuny 4y ago

The existence of siri “as it is” (sending the audio/message to Apple) is the proof that they do monetize your data. Siri is not free…

whatever1 4y ago

Facebook was one of the first big companies to implement https in a non-payment / checkout page. They also have not suffered a data breach as far as I can remember. So your data is safe with Facebook too. The only difference that I see between Apple and Facebook is that Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device, while Facebook does it on the cloud. At the end the result is the same: targeted ads to specific classes of users.

kube-system 4y ago
Facebook has had several high profile data breaches, 530 million users' data in an unsecured database in 2019, and several issues surrounding data sharing with third party apps on their platform.
lapser 4y ago
> Apple is doing the labeling of its users on device Do you have a source for this?
- kube-system 4y ago
  https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidentifiermanager/1614151-advertisingidentifier https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti... Android has one too: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/ads/identifier/AdvertisingIdClient https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/ads/identif...
  - lapser 4y ago
    That's a device specific identifier. That's not labelling users on device.
- whatever1 4y ago
  I just opened Apple News, it has a for you page and it shows me articles that are interesting to me (tech and cars), and a nice ad below them for cheap car loans. How did the Apple server know what articles to serve me? I never asked for them explicitly. So I was labeled as a user that likes tech news and cars, and the server automatically sends me stuff relevant (articles & ads) to these labels.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

FWIW the slight of hand mentioned here isn’t in the article. I presume it means the fact iCloud backups aren’t end to end encrypted with your iCloud Keychain passphrase, which was reportedly either: A) because apple wanted to be sure you could restore a device to which you lost the key (not implausible user experience story, but one you could imagine folks opting into) B) the FBI complained and they caved C) both A and B

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Note that iCloud backups include the keys needed to decode your ostensibly end-to-end encrypted iMessage history. Effectively key escrow, but they don't market it like that.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  Is there an example of this resulting in a security breach or unauthorized access to someone's iCloud data or iMessage history?
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    That seems like a bad way to think about security threats. The fact that the door is open at all is severely problematic, regardless of how many people have walked through it.
    - dkonofalski 4y ago
      That wasn't my point. The OP suggested that Apple was being deceitful about its position that this posture is "for users". To me, the fact that a user can potentially (and accidentally) lock themselves out of their own data with no recourse is a justification for a more relaxed security posture that completely lines up with being "for users". If there is no evidence of a security breach as a result of this lowered posture, then the lowered posture is both "for users" and also worth it. I, personally, would rather have the higher security posture but I can't see any way for Apple to implement that that wouldn't result in someone's grandparent unintentionally locking themselves out of years worth of data. I already see it when people don't backup their phones (to iCloud, since it's so easy) and then lose all their data when they drop their phone and it gets run over by a car. Apple must see the trade-off as worthwhile to be able to offer users the ability to gain access to their data after an extensive verification process vs. having the strongest security posture possible.

justapassenger 4y ago

Controversial statement - with the amount of scrutiny, hate and FTC oversight over companies like Facebook I have more trust in their privacy than Apple. Apple weaponized privacy to be able to enter their competitors market, all while very openly lying it’s all about the user.

dkonofalski 4y ago
How is Apple lying that it's all about the user? Their support documents clearly outline what is E2E encrypted and their explicit justification for not locking iCloud backups is specifically because of situations where users are locked out of all their information because of a forgotten password. Unless there's evidence that Apple has sustained a security breach as a result of this posture, it seems to me that they actually are caring about the user. The only incidents that I'm aware of with regard to Apple are social engineering and brute-forcing due to weak user passwords. Is there a situation or evidence that Apple is lying here?
- FireBeyond 4y ago
  "Lying" may be a little extreme. Deceptive, though, perhaps. 1. "We care about your privacy" 2. Introduce a bunch of privacy tracking controls to restrict what other parties and apps can retrieve and use vis-a-vis data and you. 3. Heavily increase your investment in your own ad network that is not subject to the same restrictions.
  - agd 4y ago
    Could you be specific about what tracking restrictions Apple imposes on others which they don’t follow themselves? My understanding was that Apple asks for user consent before letting ad networks track users across many apps run by different companies. Apple doesn’t do that themselves as far as I know?
  - dkonofalski 4y ago
    1. It seems to me that they do care about user privacy. I haven't seen any evidence yet to suggest that they don't. Tim Cook, of all people, has every reason for this to be a priority and a truthful statement. 2. The privacy tracking controls only restrict tracking across apps and websites. Individual apps are allowed to collect data and it would be impossible for Apple to guarantee that an app couldn't collect data since they clearly can't be aware of every since implementation within the app. Notice what the terms for end-users explicitly state since a company like Meta can't get info from Apple about users across FB and Insta, for example, but may have ways to tie users together based on data they're collecting on the platform itself. Apple can't really stop that. They can only make it more difficult (which they have, as evidence by FB's reaction to the new privacy controls). 3. Where do you get the idea that they're not subject to the same restrictions? I don't see any evidence that this is the case.

winter_blue 4y ago

> But once they introduced new privacy controls, they seemed to suddenly start investing more seriously in their own advertising network. That, and the encryption slight-of-hand with iCloud, makes the cynic’s case for them. This might about as clear-cut a case of unfair trade practices as there ever was.

ninth_ant 4y ago

> App telemetry, metrics, etc might get handwaved away with a sinister phrase, like “essential for improving user experience.” I don't get why these are automatically considered sinister. Measuring how people actually behave is an excellent way to improve your product. If this is done with sufficient care and anonymity, with no financial incentive to betray the user, I don't see the issue at all.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Because historically it hasn’t been 99% of the time. And no one cares about securing other people’s data.
dkonofalski 4y ago
I'm confused about this entire thread and the lawsuit considering that, as far as I can see, Apple's privacy statement explicitly says "across apps or websites". There's nothing about the privacy policy that states that they can't track you within a single app. I don't see any evidence, in the video or otherwise, that what's going on and what's shown is going against that policy. Maybe I'm naive to think that Apple doesn't cross-pollinate this data but I don't see any evidence to suggest that that's not the case or that any of this is malicious.
AlexandrB 4y ago
To me it's an issue of consent. And not the "agree to us collecting everything or GTFO" kind of consent that companies love to stick in their EULAs. Telemetry is fine as long as I have the option to disable it completely. If that option does not exist, my assumption is that there is a revenue-generating reason why this stuff is being collected and it's not just being used to "improve user experience".
ridgered4 4y ago
> If this is done with sufficient care and anonymity, with no financial incentive to betray the user, I don't see the issue at all. Even if a public company somehow managed to pass all of those caveats today the moment their leadership changed it would all go back out the window. And even a private company might go public or change leadership.

dkonofalski 4y ago

I think you're missing a key difference here, though: Apple is not selling that data to their advertisers. The key difference between Apple's privacy argument and others is that your data in the latter case is being sold to those advertisers along with the targeting. Apple, on the other hand, is using your data to personalize what you see but none of that information is sent to Apple and none of it is sold to third parties. All the personalization is being done on your devices and you can turn it off if you choose to so that you just see generic advertisements that everyone else sees. All together, I don't see how that makes Apple's trustworthiness weak in this space. In the current state of the internet, advertisement runs everything so they're still delivering on ads to their customers without selling your data or even giving those third parties a way to track you as an individual. That, to me, still equals privacy, at least as far as what Apple is saying.

FireBeyond 4y ago
If this is true I'd be genuinely surprised. Are you saying Apple's model is "Advertise through us. You'll get absolutely no feedback on the users who respond to your advertising. We will just send you a bill, 'x clicks * y cents/click'." Without arguing about whether it should or shouldn't be and the other deeper considerations, I can't see that as a compelling use of marketing dollars.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  There’s probably something to be said for targeting simply the group of people who are on apple devices, given they as a group tend to have higher disposable income. Marketers did their work without direct metrics for a long time, it’s not impossible. Apple would undoubtably not be able to charge as much as they could if they had those sorts of metrics to give, but there is a value proposition there.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  No, I'm saying that Apple is promising advertisers aggregated data about their ad performance and people reached without ever handing over individualized data. Apple, like they do with all of their third-party services, is acting as the gatekeeper between users and advertisers/third parties. They're leveraging user trust in their brand/company to say "we'll provide you with data" to advertisers while being able to tell users "we don't share your individual data with third parties". It's the same reason they insist on Apple Pay being the only method of payment for apps within the app store. They don't want to lose user trust by allowing apps to collect payment information from users. Some people think they're doing it to take advantage of their position as the device manufacturer (not a stretch, in my opinion) but I think their consistency across all devices and platforms makes the argument that they are actually doing what they're claiming for the reasons they're stating.

brundolf 4y ago

Imo incentives-based reasoning is the only way of thinking about corporate behavior that isn't naive. What's happened here is that the incentives changed, which- maybe you could call it naive to assume they wouldn't But there's also a bias, when presented with only two real options, of telling yourself that the less-bad option isn't just less-bad, it's actually good. Because it helps you sleep better at night and because there's nothing you could really do about it anyway. Same thing happens with two-party politics

kbenson 4y ago
> which- maybe you could call it naive to assume they wouldn't Definitely. I think the correct way to think about public corporate behavior is as if they're psychopaths. I don't mean that necessarily with the negative popular culture connotations, but just that they will always behave in what they see as the optimal personal benefit regardless of what it does to others. That's just what a large and for the most part anonymous ownership that expects growth coupled with a set of people to steer operations that is mandated to work in the best interest of those owners results in. So, think about your relationship with companies as you would with a friend you suspect is a psychopath but is amiable and somewhat beneficial to associate with at the moment. Just because they don't have an incentive to spread all your private info around at the moment doesn't mean they won't have reason to later, so be careful what you expose, and trust them only as far as it makes sense to. They aren't a real friend, you're just using each other for mutual benefit, and that doesn't generally last forever.

summerlight 4y ago

Apple always wanted to get into ads business, but the contenders were too strong and Apple doesn't have an edge for competition unlike Google Search, Amazon Marketplace, Facebook's user tracking etc... So instead of directly jumping into the business they decided to first level the ground with IDFA and ITP. The natural next step would be to monopolize user tracking data within the Apple ecosystem. I'm almost sure that this is "Manifest destiny" for Apple, but the question is "when".