Comment by iwontberude

3 days ago

Your critique of Apple and Tim Cook is unsubstantiated and misleading. That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them when they were pressed in 2015-2016. The same Apple that later fought against the government forcing document scanning in iCloud and was able to keep them off device. They have been fighting the whole time. Apple is was first to normalize whole disk encryption on commercial machines, they have made Safari a weapon against tracking which is abused by governments. Also every single company in the US is subject to National Security Letters and Apple uses warrant canaries to inform the public within the limits of the law.

And then to appeal to Anthropic is just offensively, willfully ignorant.

> That same Tim Cook stood up to the FBI and refused to participate in breaking into phones for them

I hope you have more evidence for this than just that press release. As far as I'm concerned that was nothing more than a stunt because while Tim Cook "fought" against the FBI, intelligence agencies and private cybersecurity companies already had the capability to break into ~all smartphones.

That single instance created an unreasonable amount of belief that iPhones are unbreakable, which is good news if you're the FBI and you want criminals to put way more trust into their iPhones than they should.

The same Apple actively aids Chinese government's suppression of civil liberties [1]. To think that there's any ideological conviction (and moral high ground) behind their [apparent] pro-privacy stance is painfully naive.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/apple-limits-i...