Comment by commandersaki
12 days ago
I don't understand these conspiracies, why would Apple put so much thought & effort into implementing security & privacy measures, so much as participating in CFRG and submitting RFCs, publishing papers, technical articles, etc. only to maliciously subvert it. If and when they do, they WILL get caught out, and they will lose something valuable that they hold, goodwill. This is a good case to apply Occam's razor.
They _get_ caught (e.g. this, CSAM, etc.). People have ridiculously short memory spans. And in the meanwhile Apple gets to benefit from "privacy first" advertisements even though the actual privacy improvements are unclear if anything.
One example of this effect is how during the CSAM scandal some people were under the wrong impression that Apple was the first to do on-device image classification. Actually they were close to the last to do it. Even Samsung (not well known for their privacy) was doing it locally. But this didn't prevent Apple from full-page advertisements claiming so.
Or Apple selling Secure Boot, Remote Attestation, etc. as technologies for "user" privacy when 20 years ago Microsoft out of all companies tried the same thing (remember Palladium) and was correctly and universally panned for it. What makes Apple so different? They're even more likely than MS to subvert these technologies in a "tie-users-to-my-hardware" way.
Whenever Apple has the opportunity to take simple, risk-free, actual privacy solutions (such as, well, allowing you to _skip their servers altogether_) they often take the complicated, trivially bypass-able approach, and claim it is because for user friendlyness. This is intentional: a complicated approach allows you to claim "sorry, implementation error!" whenever there is an issue, and avoid the appearance of maliciousness.
I'm aware of the CSAM, the execution of it wasn't surreptitious and had a huge backlash. The conspiracies I'm talking about is maliciously subverting a protocol that they've engineered secure in secret. These are conspiracy theories and have never eventuated. That's all I'll really say on the matter.