If Apple is the only organisation defending our privacy, it is time to worry

I see a bunch of comments talking about how Apple is being self serving and not at all altruistic when they defend our privacy.<p>And my response is - well duh. And this is supposed to be a problem how? Apple wants my money and nothing else. They aren&#x27;t motivated to protect my privacy out of the goodness of their hearts. I am happy to pay money for more privacy.<p>The fact that they only do this because they want my money isn&#x27;t really the interesting question to me. The interesting question to me is, why is it that they are literally the ONLY large tech company that is willing to offer me this tradeoff? I&#x27;m willing to pay a premium of probably hundreds of dollars on a phone because I want privacy, and nobody else will even consider selling me one? How much is my data really worth to advertisers? Like, a hundred bucks a year? Ok sure, where do I pay to get ownership of my data back?<p>Samsung, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft don&#x27;t sell privacy, or if they do, they&#x27;re sure doing a bang up job hiding it. None of them have any altruistic motives either, so I can only conclude that they either don&#x27;t want my money or they&#x27;re really bad at what they do?<p>Is there really no other company that wants to get in on this privacy game? Because the people who really care about this are probably affluent and willing to pay a lot for it.

This is not true. As I have submitted on HN earlier, Apple is using the purchases data to customise ads. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-in&#x2F;HT208477" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-in&#x2F;HT208477</a><p>You can make a case that the ad targeting is just on App Store, News and Stocks but that is just for now, Apple used to have an ad platform iAd which wasn&#x27;t that successful, so it was discontinued. Once they milk other revenue streams and are more of a monopolistic power in other web properties(like Maps), I am quite sure ads will make a return.<p>Bottom line is, at this point Apple is also building user profiles like Facebook.<p>Edit:<p>It seems like Ben has deleted his tweet. I will just update the link to Apple&#x27;s support page and quote the relevant section.<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;We also use information about your account, purchases, and downloads in the stores to offer advertising to ensure that ads on the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks, where available, are relevant to you.&quot;&quot;&quot;

A lot of folks are aligning Apple&#x27;s motive to somehow gain advantage in ads business as if they&#x27;d able to compete with Google, Amazon or Facebook someday in ads biz. I don&#x27;t think that is their real motive. I believe Apple&#x27;s real motive with all these privacy centric features such as ATT, Sign in with Apple, Apple card data not being tracked for targeting etc. is to create a privacy centric moat and platform&#x2F;ecosystem that is simply missing from the market right now and they know that they have real advantages of keeping people in their ecosystem with this moat. I&#x27;m actually happy that they are doing this.

Apple also has a question mark attached to its commitment to privacy in China.<p>Even though the Twitter thread below is by a NYT reporter, it sounds directionally credible given how embedded Apple is in China, both from a manufacturing point of view and also as a growing market.<p>2021-MAY-18<p>&quot;NEW: Apple is jeopardizing its Chinese users’ data and augmenting the Chinese government’s censorship to placate authorities and keep its business running. Here is our multiyear investigation into Apple&#x27;s Faustian bargain in China: ...&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jacknicas&#x2F;status&#x2F;1394378309325230080" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jacknicas&#x2F;status&#x2F;1394378309325230080</a>

There&#x27;s still a huge elephant in the room. How are we supposed to trust Apple, Microsoft or any other tech company when it emerged that they fully cooperated with the NSA and their PRISM program.<p>We have to just assume that&#x27;s still running. Businesses could keep a lot of secrets from us and they&#x27;re not transparent or accountable to the public.

Reminder: while it&#x27;s true that Apple protects your privacy in the context of third party app data collection on your devices, it doesn&#x27;t make it an “organization defending our privacy either”. They collect tons of data about you, and share them with third parties as they wish and their privacy policy is pretty explicit about it:<p>&gt; <i>Personal Data Apple Collects from You</i><p>&gt; Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data<p>&gt; Location Information. Precise location only to support Find My, and coarse location<p>&gt; Health Information. Data relating to the health status of an individual, including data related to one’s physical or mental health or condition. Personal health data also includes data that can be used to make inferences about or detect the health status of an individual. If you participate in a study using an Apple Health Research Study app, the policy governing the privacy of your personal data is described in the Apple Health Study Apps Privacy Policy.<p>&gt; Fitness Information. Details relating to your fitness and exercise information where you choose to share them Financial Information. Details including salary, income, and assets information where collected, and information related to<p>&gt; Apple’s Sharing of Personal Data<p>&gt; Apple may share personal data with service providers who act on our behalf, our partners, or others at your direction. Further, Apple does not share personal data with third parties for their own marketing purposes.<p>&gt; Partners. At times, Apple may partner with third parties to provide services or other offerings. For example, Apple financial offerings like Apple Card and Apple Cash are offered by Apple and our partners. Apple requires its partners to protect your personal data.<p>source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;en-ww&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;en-ww&#x2F;</a>

While some worry that Apple&#x27;s the only organization defending privacy, others are attacking it for trying to control its ecosystem (in part so it can defend their users&#x27; privacy).<p>That&#x27;s the world right now.

I truly wonder why people still believe they have any privacy, any right to privacy, or, that they could do anything about it.<p>Sun Microsystems‘ Scott McNealy was vocal about this already in the late 1990s: „you have no privacy, get over it“<p>Look, even if you were able to get FAANG et al. to honor privacy, there will always be the one player that does not. Then, the people who write privacy laws have no clue what they are doing. Plus, I’ve seen software professionals copy&#x2F;pasting encryption algorithms that contain errors from stackoverflow into production code.<p>It’s time to face reality, this ship has sailed, stop whining, finally start adapting to an environment without privacy: Treat all your data as if they would become public one day.<p>Use your energy to teach others to be tech literate to understand what this means, how to deal with this and how to behave.

Scrub forward until you see a yellow note pad.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.twitch.tv&#x2F;videos&#x2F;1032025987" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.twitch.tv&#x2F;videos&#x2F;1032025987</a><p>The source to complete it is on my GitHub. My IG of same handle has progress pics, recently marketing and sales.<p>I’m sure there are many more similar projects out there, unsure if like I they are angling for physical communities and local taxes.<p>TDC and iSL have initial docs, and the CarPuter machine is like $750 of parts.<p>I have many app designs up the stack. Captured as video or drawings or in slices as prototypes.<p>City Apper. IG, .com... still turning the lights on.<p>I picture each community having one, like a community center. B corp.<p>If others run with the idea then great.<p>I have some unique work constraints on the .com mockup modeled after a successful real life organization and my own experience bootstrapping and being close to it.<p>I’m my own customer for a few years, now homeless it runs at 4-9W even Twitch streaming screen cap, web cam, and using headset audio.<p>Ie. we can DIY and reasonably commercialize 1-off hardware. My favorite tacos seem more expensive than chain tacos, but are way more nutrient rich thus worth the cost.<p>Decentralized. In line with Internet OG. RSS friendly, merchant integration, XMPP, EmailInABox, iCal, LUKS, GPS, USB 3, LTE modem, CDN caching, ....

The author gives Apple credit for solving a problem Apple created.<p>Apple doesn&#x27;t care about protecting you. They care about protecting their own advertising market share. They don&#x27;t want to stop tracking your iPhone. They want competitors like Google to stop tracking your iPhone (for free). Apple wants to get paid for that.<p>If Apple cared about you then tracking functionality would not exist.

Tech has a long tail - if you generalize from the big players track record things may look grim, but that is ignoring the rest of the field. That is to say, no - it is not only Apple who defends our privacy - and yes you should dig deeper when thinking about these things.

Weird the The Guardian of all people are calling Apple an &quot;organisation&quot; rather than &quot;company&quot;.<p>As for organisations that cater to personal privacy, I don&#x27;t see any mention in the article about Purism, Mozilla, LinageOS, F-Droid, QubesOS etc.

The privacy debacle on tech is yet another case of anyone in pistons of power making decisions about technology knowing absolutely nothing about it.<p>The big consulting firms have monetized this. Silicon valley ad-tech too.<p>I keep hoping it can&#x27;t last.

If Apple offers real privacy now, that&#x27;s good for them and the consumers who are willing to pay premium for privacy. Two questions:<p>1. Is there a way to verify that Apple is not using or selling the user&#x27;s data?<p>2. What is preventing Apple, after gathering all the users data, from changing its EULA&#x2F;ToS and starting to sell the user data? Is an average user going to export all the data from Apple and jump to another platform (if there is one offering better privacy)?

I am somehow seeing this as a good&#x2F;evil cycle -- Google and Amazon, even Facebook at times used to be the good guys. Now Apple and Microsoft are getting higher on the horse. It may revert eventually, I assume &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; is counter-incentivised by many things.<p>But now the most interesting thing to me is if FB&#x2F;Google really are pushed by this privacy narrative to change their business model.

The only reason behind the iOS changes is because Apple failed to compete with Facebook ads. If Apple didn&#x27;t sell ads using the same data I could maybe believe there privacy bullshit.

Apple is in it for themselves too. Stop falling for this.

I&#x27;m surprised to not see too much discussion about GDPR here.<p>But the question I have is under what legal basis do companies use the tracking identifiers? Surely the only legal basis available to them is consent? So Apple has kindly made the consent collection infrastructure part of iOS (and therefore standardised and therefore user friendly).<p>So are the complaints about Apple forcing them to obey the law? That seems pretty strange to me.

Apple should not have to lead the charge for user privacy. The government (particularly Congress, in some cases State Legislatures) needs to step up and create modern rules for a modern society.<p>While you can’t “cook up” new laws as quickly as an engineer can a prototype, trusting a private entity - with only the power to regulate its own devices and activity - is foolish, if just merely in scope. The interests of a private org just complicate the picture further.

I know HN will downvote the hell out of people who doubt Apple, but Apple is most certainly not defending any privacy with their closed-source OS.<p>For one, it takes quite a bit more on an iOS device to jailbreak it and use an MITM proxy to inspect what apps are doing under the hood than it does for an Android device to do the same. I feel much more peace of mind that I know exactly what apps are sending to their servers and back and that I can inspect it at any time, and Android forks such as LineageOS provide for actually sending <i>fake</i> sensor data back to apps instead of just denying them permissions, which in many cases just cause apps to refuse to function.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;antoniogm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;antoniogm</a><p>That guy was just fired by apple after a staff revolt described as &quot;woke&quot; which made news.<p>Separate to that, his alumn is facebook, specifically ads. Whatever spin they put on it he was literally hired to monetize for apple the private data they hold that belongs to you. There is zero contractual it enforceable commitment by Apple to prevent them from stealing and doing literally anything they like with your data for a reason. They will do it the instant it is worth the reputational hit for officially announcing their privacy marketing is knowingly dishonest. Which it is.<p>If they had any value at all on your privacy it would have contractual protection. Cannot be sold, cannot be provided to a third party without being legal compelled, cannot be used by Apple. It&#x27;s easy to do this and they have chosen not to. It would cost dramatically less than their &quot;these things are private&quot; ad campaign. Orders of magnitude less. It would get orders of magnitude more reach than their ad campaign. They don&#x27;t have this in contact for a reason. That reason <i>is</i> bait and switch. Their advertising overtures to privacy are worth even less than Google&#x27;s lack of them. Apple are utterly foul.<p>The bar is so unbelievably low and apple, google, facebook, and all their ilk compete to get deeper below it and bash us harder.<p>It&#x27;s our fault. We didn&#x27;t do... Like they commanded. See what we made then do?<p>&#x2F;Waves to apple zealots and gravy train riders.