Comment by KolmogorovComp
14 days ago
> Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage?
This is incorrect. The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
Sure the best way would be for people not to use them, but if you "have" to, then it's better to use those on IOS.
>This is incorrect. The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
Source?
Here’s one example:
> Meta devised an ingenious system (“localhost tracking”) that bypassed Android’s sandbox protections to identify you while browsing on your mobile phone — even if you used a VPN, the browser’s incognito mode, and refused or deleted cookies in every session.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44235467
That's only one example, and as I explained in a sibling comment[1] doesn't even seem like something iOS designers were specifically defending against. In light of this, I think it's fair to say this example is poor and that another one is warranted. For instance, I'd consider the app tracking transparency changes to be something where iOS was doing better than Android on, but Android has since reached feature parity on that because you can delete your advertising id, which basically does the same thing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46755250
I agree with the thrust of the GP comment but:
> The IOS versions of social media apps extract way less data from the device than on android, and is thus more privacy friendly.
I seriously doubt this. I agree that this is the perception but anyone working in the mobile space on both platforms for the past ~2 years will know Google is a lot more hard nosed in reviewing apps for privacy concerns than Apple these days (I say this negatively, there is a middle ground and Apple is much closer to it - Google is just friction seemingly in an attempt to lose their bad reputation).
Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
In contrast, on iOS I get prompted to allow or deny access to my information when the app tries calling Apple’s API to fetch that information.
For example, if an app wants access to my contacts to find other people using the app. On iOS I can simply say “no” when it prompts me to allow it to read my contacts. I lose out on that feature to find other people using the app, which I don’t care about, but I can still use the rest of the app. On Android it seemed like by installing the app, I had already agreed to give up my contacts… it was all or nothing. If I don’t like one privacy compromising feature, I couldn’t use the app at all.
Android may have improved this in the last few years, but I found it to be a dealbreaker for the entire platform.
> Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.
Sounds like it was years ago... I remember that it was being introduced like... more than a decade ago? Of course maybe it took longer than iOS because of how Android works. iOS can just force everybody to use liquid glass with one update, Android has to think more about backward compatibility.
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It would be nice if the app stores offered different levels of requirements. Let the market decide how much it cares about privacy (and security, and ...), reduce the friction for developers who want to do a particular thing, and give end users more confidence in the entire system.
In what manner do they extract less data
Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good. Okay let's be honest it's fairly abysmal at preventing fingerprinting. It could almost be accused of not even bothering to try.
But one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866
Even with graphene I don't believe it mitigates much as far as apps collecting data. The idea for more privacy is you run open source apps instead that just don't collect data.
AFAIK Graphene is oriented towards strong device security with privacy as more of a side effect.
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> Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good. Okay let's be honest it's fairly abysmal at preventing fingerprinting.
Hmm... the sandboxing is a security feature, it's not there to prevent tracking (not sure what "fingerprinting" includes here). The sandboxing of Android is actually pretty good (a lot better than, say, desktop OSes).
There is pretty much nothing you can do against an app requesting e.g. your location data and sending it to their servers. Fundamentally, the whole goal of apps is that they can technically do that. Then you have to choose apps you trust, and it's easier to trust open source apps.
What GrapheneOS brings in terms of sandboxing is that the Play Services run sandboxed like normal apps. Whereas on Android, the Play Services run with system permissions.
The mobile operating system developed by the enormous ad tech company doesn't try to prevent fingerprinting?! :O
>Unless you're running Graphene or a similar security minded distro the sandboxing isn't very good
Grapheneos doesn't prevent the installed apps fingerprinting you linked either.
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You'd think this would be more known! I feel like general sentiment says the opposite is the case.. What can one point to in the future to show what you are saying here?
Nope, they have exact same data collecyion policy. Just represented in a different way on app store. That's the illusion they create