Apple sells hardware differentiated by integrated software for premium pricing. They want to build better and more expensive products through superior design and quality control. Collecting and analyzing personal data isn't the most important thing for their business. They might see more benefit by eschewing personal data collection and marketing a privacy-focused message, which they seem to be doing.<p>In contrast, Google and Facebook are companies that sell advertising. The value they can offer to publishers and advertisers completely relies on how well they know their users. Their competitive moat involves collection of proprietary data to continuously improve their products. These are clear incentives to be sticky and greedy with your information, but also to keep it private and proprietary for their own sake.<p>With these incentives in mind, I more readily trust Apple when it says that it will not collect my data compared to data conglomerates, and Apple hasn't done anything to aggressively betray that idea in its history (to my knowledge). Combined with the technical security advantages of iOS, I'm inclined to believe Apple products to be the least-bad option for the security-minded today.
I'm happy Apple is at least trying hard to deal with privacy but honestly I don't think they are doing enough, at least for me.<p>For example, I don't really want to give most apps constant access to my photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don't have a whole lot of choice if I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..<p>I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo. Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.<p>As for the Camera I don't give any of those apps access to the camera because I don't trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.<p>Mic access is more problematic. I don't want any of them to have mic access when I'm not using the mic function directly but I can't talk to my friends who use all those services to call me if I don't give the apps mic access.<p>I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they'd handle these issues in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases. Don't let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app, and then just giving the result to the app.
Apple chose to let the China government into their China data center and Google chose to leave the country instead. So not so simple on who you trust. Personally I trust Google more as they are just a lot better at keeping things secure, imo. Plus governments getting into data is a bigger deal to me than a targeted ad. But it is a personal decision.<p>"A Local Chinese Government Will Oversee Apple’s New iCloud Data Center"<p><a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/apple-china-icloud-data-center/" rel="nofollow">http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/apple-china-icloud-data-center...</a>
At least one company is "trying" keep my photos private. The other day Google Photo told my wife it had prepared an album for our trip to SFO. We were surprised because she already disabled Geo-tagging but whataya know... Google still figured it out!
Privacy is one of those things I can't tangibly describe why I like it, but it just feels good to know that nothing is being saved, even in contrast to just targeting you for ads and nothing else.
A few things have struck me really strong on Apple's stand and implementation on protecting users' privacy:<p>1. Though it's understandable that Apple earns money primarily by selling hardware, it's sort of amusing and alarming at the same time that a proprietary almost-closed-source software company is focusing on protecting and preserving privacy whereas partially open source platforms competing with Apple seem to be nowhere close on this aspect. Do any of the Android forks try to do as much as Apple does for privacy right out of the box (something a non-technical lay person could get)?<p>2. It's abundantly clear that a lot of thought has gone into the foundations of a design focused on protecting privacy and in creating silos of information in/with different SDKs and features.<p>3. It's a bit unclear to me as to why Health data is stored encrypted in iCloud whereas messages aren't. Is there a distinction here between iCloud sync and iCloud backups? The documentation on messages suggests turning off iCloud backup as a protective measure.<p>4. To me, the weakest link in the ecosystem seems to be third party apps, where Apple relies more on them adhering to the developer guidelines and on publishing a privacy policy.
Apple's approach to privacy also includes being a partner in PRISM, a fact which they chose to vigorously deny as false allegations until it was proven to be true.<p>Every story about Apple and privacy chooses to omit thus huge piece of info.<p>Why should anybody trust them now? What has changed to make anybody believe they aren't still lying about privacy?
I wish the EFF still made those "Who has your back" infographics, they were really helpful if you wanted to find out which companies respected your data both online and in the courts. But IMO Apple is the only large multinational corporation that is actually taking steps to protect my privacy so I'm way more inclined to trust them with my personal information. Can't say the same for Google or others.
After reading this, I have two questions:<p>1. Are there any statistics showing the ratio of security issues between Android and iOS?<p>2. What's the most common phone among security researchers?<p>To be honest, I'm wary of believing this, but I own a Nexus and if I had to give the benefit of the doubt to either Google or Apple, it would most certainly be Apple because they don't make business out of my data (or, not as much as Google, at least).
> While we do back up iMessage and SMS messages for your convenience using iCloud Backup, you can turn it off whenever you want.<p>Wouldn't they be able to hold that privacy promise much better if they actually allowed people to keep iCloud backup on let's say for pictures, but still be able to disable iMessage messages? I think many people would like to use iCloud but without it backing up personal conversations, too.<p>Also, iMessage's end-to-end encryption was rather flawed last Matthew Green checked, compared to other end-to-end messaging apps.<p><a href="https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-of-week-apple-imessage/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-o...</a><p>As for their use of differential privacy, when they introduced that it was essentially a hidden way of gather <i>more</i> of your data than before, not less, but while still being able to say "hey, we may gather more data than ever on you starting with the new iOS, but it's <i>pretty</i> private, so it's cool, don't worry about it".<p>All of that said, I know Apple is still miles ahead of Google on privacy. If anything, over the last 1-2 years, Google has become increasingly bolder and more shameless about tracking users without them realizing (except in the EU, where they are <i>forced</i> to make it a little easier for users to understand how they are being tracked, and even that happened because of the anti-trust lawsuit).<p>Here's just one example of Google's increasingly privacy-hostile behavior:<p><a href="https://www.extremetech.com/internet/238093-google-quietly-changed-its-privacy-policy-no-longer-promises-to-anonymize-your-personal-information-when-selling-ads" rel="nofollow">https://www.extremetech.com/internet/238093-google-quietly-c...</a>
> Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data <i>when it’s in transit between devices</i><p>What about when it's <i>not</i> in transit between devices?
On the subject of privacy, I'm interested in migrating away from Google services, but I have years' worth of data tied up there (email, photos, music, movies, etc). I know Google offers ways to download your data, so it's technically possible to migrate, but it would be tedious and time consuming, to say the least.<p>Does anyone have suggestions for making that process easier?
Apple does so many things well, actually. I would return to them for some things and even recommend them (versus exclusively GNU/Linux and LineageOS) if they'd only change the stupid iOS terms that prohibit GPL software.
On Android you can Sideload VPN apps, iOS on the otherhand banned them in China. Apple mounted the most successful attack on General Computing with it's walled garden. The whole Apple is good for privacy is marketing.