Comment by HeavenFox
25 days ago
Of all the major tech companies around the world, Apple has the most incentive to actually deliver privacy, and has the best track record.
25 days ago
Of all the major tech companies around the world, Apple has the most incentive to actually deliver privacy, and has the best track record.
The Snowden PRISM revelations showed that all the major tech companies work with the US government and its spy agencies. Can't trust anyone.
Snowden’s PRISM leak seemed largely to be an overhyped internal PowerPoint. The claim was that they have access to data from Apple, Google, Microsoft, et al. But I’ve never seen any evidence that these companies were giving the government access to their servers or some general data pipe. But rather than they were cooperating with legally served warrants.
Is there some actual evidence of collusion with the big tech companies? Because I haven’t seen it. (Telecoms I’ve heard were and are much more integrated.)
PRISM was FISA, and was overhyped. There's a known (and legal) procedure for law enforcement agencies to go to major tech companies with a warrant and say "We need all the information for the account holder of xyz@gmail.com, because they are the subject of an active investigation." There are some concerns about how FISA courts are just rubber-stamps and don't actually read or challenge the warrants for validity, but at least nominally, the procedure is above-board and legal.
The next Snowden disclosure (MUSCULAR) was significantly more concerning though. It was that the NSA was tapping the internal fiber of Big Tech companies. I was at Google when the Snowden disclosures broke, and read the SRE postmortem. They found 2 fiber cuts underneath the English Channel, an hour apart, lining up with the start of the program as disclosed by Snowden. My inference is that the NSA paid off MI6 to send a submarine commando team to cut and tap the fiber of an American company, without consent, and then all the data was shared through Five-Eyes reciprocal data sharing agreements. Google leadership was hopping mad after this, but it would've been impolitic to bring it to the public. They started encrypting all internal traffic soon after, assuming that their internal network was compromised by various nation-state actors, which had some unfortunate effects on their internal culture of openness.
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All of the three big powers force their Big Tech companies to lets call it co-operate. Ask yourself why...
> Of all the major tech companies around the world, Apple has the most incentive to actually deliver privacy, and has the best track record.
Honestly, based on what? That they haven't been caught?
It's a major selling point, for one. They actively sell their products on privacy to the average person and an exposé would harm their image quite significantly.
That said they are not perfect - e.g their wording in their own tracking consent prompts vs the ones they force on others.
> It's a major selling point, for one.
That's marketing. Do you always trust everything in marketing material?
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Apple perceives itself as a prestige brand. That perception depends upon consistently high execution and a perception that they’re trying to create beautiful experiences for users.
They want the device to be a mechanism for you to purchase things. Hence the “Apple card” and all the hullabaloo around that. You’ll only use your phone if you perceive it to be secure. Apple’s investments in Secure Enclave’s, sandboxing are all directly linked to their belief that this will help the consumer perceive the safety of the product- and again, it goes back to the perception of the brand.
Quality craftsmanship has properties that outsiders can perceive- even if they don’t understand it. Apple makes those investments.
Google- well, they just make things and then abandon them. Android’s bizzaro world open source is a chaotic mess that reflects the lack of discipline in Google’s leadership.
Yes, they make great devices. I have many. But do we _know_ that what they claim is fact?
And I don't know what Google has to do with this.
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My question is what do you connect this TO that doesn't spy. I get you can use a Smart TV and switch to HDMI input but there's no guarantee the TV is not spying on you in some way, if not today then tomorrow these things will come with eSIM support to upload ACR data even when 'disconnected' or connect to your smartphone over some ad tech protocol to do the same.
Yeah, this is certainly already a problem.
I trust Apple for a number of reasons, but I really had to be really aggressive about the TV it’s connected to.
But also, a smaller footprint is a smaller footprint. I’ll take “better” where I can get it.
Today, just don't connect your smart TV to a network, and you should be fine. (Assuming there's no open/passwordless WiFi networks nearby.)
If/when devices start shipping with cellular modems and eSIMs... honestly not sure. Faraday cage? Physically remove the modem? (If that doesn't prevent the device from booting.)
..: Surely the specs (or … whatever compliance paperwork, CE etc?) of the device have to state if it includes a modem or not?
If it does then don’t buy it?
If you want privacy (or anything for that matter), the only way you're going to get it is by user choice. A device that doesn't let you install your own apps is not going to deliver what you want.
You can install your own apps on a Samsung Galaxy.
For privacy, I'd recommend hardware with as few blobs as possible and of course an unlocked bootloader.
I don’t trust them for privacy. I like them for the lack of annoyance. All their competitors seems to want to hinder any activity I want to do. Ads, nagging, notifications, … It’s basically a mental tax.
Apple has their own ad targeting program, and they only need to seem to deliver privacy.
> and has the best track record.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
Yeah, great track record there.
How does this one instance refute the argument you quoted?
You will never silence the paranoid lunatics who come out in droves whenever Apple is discussed.
The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection. It doesn’t matter all of the drastic steps they’ve taken to ensure that past mistakes are never made again or that their hands are tied when governments make demands of them in the future. It doesn’t matter that they’re demonstrably orders of magnitude better than everyone else.
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Hopefully you do understand what "track record" means, especially when it isn't really a clean one.
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> and has the best track record
Or maybe they are just not caught yet. They are now running ads, where is the data coming for that. They stop others from using the APIs but nothing stop their first party apps to snoop and use the data.
Apple AirTag is the biggest privacy nightmare out there and I am not sure why people keep Apple separate from other data hungry companies