501 points
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This is the correct response. Either everyone has protection or no one has. Not that I’d trust apple anyway but by pulling the service your average person is likely to make some noise because they can feel the effect.

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108 points
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I’m not even an Apple user but somehow I still feel like Apple is one of the very last companies where privacy and the security of your data is more worth than a dime.

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37 points
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Nope, Apple sells your data just as much as Google does: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/apple-ad-revenues-skyrocket-amid-its-privacy-changes https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/22/23513061/apple-iphone-app-store-ads-privacy-antitrust#luMMel

While people noticed their new policies against 3rd party apps, that masked the fact that those policies carved out an exception for first party apps, meaning they collect (anonymous) data on you through Health, Journal, Music, etc. just like every other company. “Trusting them more” is simply a result of you and everyone else getting hit with their privacy ads recently.

Edit: “just like every other company” meant Google and Microsoft, i.e. the other big equivalent tech companies, my fault for not being specific.

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144 points

While I’m all for calling out companies for abusing your privacy, your own links show that they don’t collect as much data as google. They could (and should) be better though.

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86 points

Anonymous data is actually pretty different to the data everyone else collects, which literally has your name and picture

Apple’s data is useful for trends but it can’t be used to study who I am.

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68 points

As much as Google? Likely not. Does their carefully curated pro-privacy image actually match their practices? Also likely not.

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41 points

“Just as much as Google.” LMAO. We have an expert here.

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39 points

I feel like wuth the amount of stuff done on device and not in the cloud with iPhones and other Apple products, saying that Apple sells just as much as Google is at the very least disingenuous…

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18 points

There is a massive leap between collecting data and selling your data.

I am against both but in the digital age actually knowing who has your data is such a relief. My old email got sold to third party’s a bit to many times and to this day 80% of the incoming messages are blatant generic America targeted phishing.

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10 points

Health is on-device, and is E2EE. To my knowledge, that’s always been the case. They do allow optional data linking services, but those need to be setup by the end-user. Apple should have no knowledge of this data, by default. Notes can be E2EE (with ADP), and with Journal (a new iOS feature) being E2EE. Music is a paid for service, with no ads, and is one of the more privacy respecting options. Data is needed for Music to help serve the user, and suggest artists/songs… it’s literally one of the platforms benefits, over self-hosting.

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2 points

@zettajon @hardypart there is nothing stating that Apple is using your data, selling your data, or even getting your data. While it did create a situation where ad dollars are going to App Store it’s still not targeted other than by search. Your own posted link says nothing about what you claimed. There are plenty of issues to bring up about Apple without the need of fabricating one.

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-2 points

Did you read the article you posted? Apple serve you ads, they don’t sell your data. And they allow you to opt out of tracking. It’s all right there in your article.

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-3 points

They’re just jumping on theme. It’s what they do. Appeal to trend.

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-13 points
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Any company that obfuscates all their security practices, refuses to give statistics on security risks and counter measures, and boils their product security down to “Trust us, bro.”, doesn’t actually give a fuck about your security. They’re just the last company who is still able to keeps everything secret so they can make shit up as they go along. Apple’s security is a joke and they’re just as bad as any other manufacturer on the market, the only difference is they have successfully kept their shit secret for all these years and spent decades convincing people they actually give a fuck about security.

I still remember a few years ago having a conversation with a coworker about her iphone and she bragged about Apple never being hacked and this was right after I had just got done reading an article about a large scale hack on their network. Of course Apple never said a damned thing about it, so I forwarded her the article. IIRC she mumbled something about how the article was probably not accurate. Apple fanatics do some crazy mental gymnastics to justify them spending thousands on a phone thats probably worth about $300 at best(their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market).

Did you know that most celebrity phone hacks are thru apple accounts?

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25 points

obfuscates all their security practices

https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-security-guide.pdf

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-protection-for-icloud-sec973254c5f/web

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/cloudkit/encrypting_user_data

I had just got done reading an article about a large scale hack on their network

Source? Or should I just “trust you bro”

Did you know that most celebrity phone hacks are thru apple accounts?

Did you know that most celebrities own iPhones by a far margin? These aren’t the encryption was broken hacks when someone is getting into an iCloud account, these are social engineering hacks. That’s what happens when your publicist, your agent, and others have access to your digital accounts so they can get you a new phone quick while you are on the road, grab the photos you took on your phone from your iCloud account to share, etc. More holes in security.

about $300 at best(their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market)

Flagship android phones, barring a few exceptions, are not sold without pre-installed apps that subsidize the cost of the phone.

Do you have an example of a device priced at $300 with competitive hardware to the base iPhone 14, without bloatware subsidizing the cost of the device? I’d accept that generally iPhones are ~$100-200 above the price of devices with competitive hardware, but a current gen iPhone having $300 hardware? The specs are very similar to other devices in similar price ranges

I’ve owned both Pixels and iPhones before. While each has its pros and cons, I’ve found that the app sandboxing, default settings, and ability to opt out of telemetry was always better on iPhone. And until google has free, easy-to-use E2E encryption for Android devices and the related cloud services, customer data on Google’s servers is more at risk to be stolen/sold for profit/used without explicit user consent.

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10 points

Apple processors outperform flagship android phones on benchmarks every generation. Where are you getting your information?

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74 points

I think this is correct response not just in case of morality, but in case of technology. How can you guaranty privacy of a call if the recipient is from UK?

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31 points

iMessage isn’t a big loss in the UK. FaceTime would be.

WhatsApp pulling out of the UK would have the biggest impact. Almost everyone uses it here.

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7 points

Can confirm, it had swipe to reply for a while now, it’s coming to iMessage in next iOS… The only thing that annoys me about WhatsApp is the high picture compression resulting in low quality images.

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12 points

If you need to send uncompressed images send it as a “document” rather than an image. You won’t get the preview but it’ll be the same file as on your phone.

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4 points

WhatsApp also uses E2EE, wouldn’t also be targeted under this same legislation?

Meta pulling WhatsApp out of the UK would affect way more people.

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4 points

Yes that’s what I was suggesting.

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209 points
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I wonder how many complaining here actually read even this bland and uninformative article.

At issue I believe (because it is not stated, but discussed elsewhere in better venues) is that UK wants to be able to see inside encrypted comms and files, under the guise of CSAM detection. Apple is right to oppose it.

Arguments based on hypocrisy real or perceived in other venues (china) has nothing to do with this decision its just piss-taking. Give it a rest.

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43 points

Other than their asinine charging cable/accessory situations I consistently find myself agreeing with Apple pretty much any time any government body or group is mad they won’t do something.

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46 points

They’re generally on the wrong side of the battle for right to repair and removable batteries too.

But yeah, privacy they almost always have the right of it.

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21 points

Requiring usb c was something I agreed with. But indeed many times apple has rightly fought for their userbase.

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18 points

how do you reckon?

only time they have been on the consumer’s side was with regards to privacy, refusing to comply with the FBI and now this.

everything else they are pretty anti-consumer, off the top of my head

  • first to remove jack 3.5 (even though I don’t really care about this, others do.)
  • sticking to shitty lightning cable so they can sell overpriced cables
  • the charger thing with the EU
  • worst of all entirely against right to repair
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1 point
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0 points

To be fair, those first three points fall squarely under that “charging cable/accessory situations” exception. With Apple, it turns out that’s a pretty broad exception.

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-28 points
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24 points

Remember how everyone kicked up a giant stink about apple adding “on device CSAM scanning when uploading photos to iCloud”?

They did that precisely because it would allow them to search for CSAM without giving up any privacy. As I said back when all that rage was happening, if apple don’t get to implement it this way you can be damn sure that the government is going to force them to implement CSAM scanning in a much more privacy-destroying way, and well here we are.

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21 points

CSAM without giving up any privacy.

Hmmmm funny because security researchers said the opposite, I kinda believe them more?

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2 points

Who said it was givening up privacy. The worst I heard is slippery slope of they donthis they might ad more to it later. And how was it privacy compromising?

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1 point

How did they say it’s giving up privacy?

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15 points

Like the politicians would have cared. This is just a convenient excuse. Either they would have found another one or they would have said “we can’t trust Apple to scan for this material. The police has to do these scans!”

We were right to oppose it then and we are right to oppose it now.

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-9 points

We were right to oppose it then and we are right to oppose it now.

You were right to oppose doing it in the most privacy conscious way? Or were you against CSAM scanning at all?

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7 points

CSAM, as defined by apple, SPOILER that could be anything, including, and I could rattle off names, anything that threatens the government or those who got their tendrils into it, if we, For example have authoritarians change us to be facist, or re-introduce slavery or segrogation. A mere picture of your bedroom or face could have a somthing in it that allows you to be put into a cohort for later use (legal or not)

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4 points
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No, that’s not at all what it was defined as or what it could be. CSAM is Child Sex Abuse Material. It wasn’t going to be memes of winny the pooh like people argued.

That’s also not how CSAM matching works. It simply compares hashes of images. If you take a photo of you in your bedroom with a sign saying “fuck the government” it will not match any CSAM database hashes no matter how authoritarian or fascist the government is, because they don’t have that same photo in their CSAM databases.

You’re doing what the outraged did back then and thinking CSAM scanning is some sort of AI powered image recognition that scans images for specific things. It’s not that at all. It is a database of known CSAM images that have been hashed and that have been confirmed by multiple different governments (multiple different ones so one government can’t just put an image of their president that they don’t like in theirs and then find out who has uploaded that photo. If it only appears in one government CSAM database it will not be checked). It takes your photo, hashes it, and then checks to see if that hash is in the CSAM database. It won’t be, ever.

You know what will be in there and matched? If you download child porn that is already out there on the web.

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5 points

Anything scanning messages or media on my device is an absolute NO if I don’t control it.

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1 point

You did control it though. It only scanned what you were uploading to iCloud, and only during the upload process.

If you turned off iCloud upload it never scanned anything.

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20 points

so basically apple doesn’t want government spyware on their phones

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3 points

Exactly! Apple wants to make sure the personal data they hand out is directly from them.

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161 points

There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.

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83 points

Walled garden aside, I think they do care about privacy and security.

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68 points
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It’s their brand. And I’m glad it is. It’s something Samsung can’t copy (I presume because of the Google backbone) or attack.

(Written on a Samsung phone btw.)

Edit. I should probably add why it’s good even when I’m not in their ecosystem. It raises the bar for competition and shows that privacy adds value.

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28 points

I don’t know if they actually care, but I think they figured privacy was a great niche to jump in when they started losing more and more market share to android

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7 points

It’s a brilliant move for Apple because Google can’t play that game.

Google is fundamentally an advertising company. They materially benefit from user data in providing a more valuable service to advertisers. If Google takes a strong stance on privacy, it could disadvantage the primary business.

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3 points

Definitely a differentiator

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1 point

Yup. They have had issues (think CSAM scandal), but they’re slowly earning back my trust. I’m still a bit wary, but for big tech they have a pretty good track record.

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15 points

They have had issues (think CSAM scandal)

People like you that think that was a “scandal” are half the problem though.

What they were doing with the on-device CSAM scanning as part of the upload to iCloud only was actually good for your privacy. It enabled them to comply with any current and future CSAM laws while protecting your privacy by doing the scanning on your device. It meant that they could then add E2E encryption to iCloud (and then iMessage as well) while still complying with CSAM laws. The alternative - and what everyone else does including google, microsoft, imgur, dropbox, etc - is doing the CSAM scanning in the cloud after you’ve uploaded it completely insecurely, requiring the data to be stored unencrypted and visible to those companies (and the government).

Doing it on device should have been applauded, but it was attacked by people that didn’t understand how it’s actually better for them. There was so much misinformation thrown around - that it would scan all of your photos and files as soon as they were created and then instantly report to the police if you took a photo of your infant in the bath, for example, or that it would be used by governments to identify people who have memes saved that they don’t like, which is absurd because that’s not how the CSAM databases work.

Apples proposed CSAM scanning was literally the best for privacy in the entire industry, and people created such an outrage over it that they basically went “oh well, we’ll just do what everyone else is doing which is far more insecure and worse for privacy” and everyone congratulated themselves lol

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115 points
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The incumbent government is circling the drain and are, it seems, determined to leave a trail of destruction and burned bridges for their successors to repair.

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82 points

That is how conservative parties work, yes.

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13 points

In the UK, even conservatives hate the conservatives. It’s quite impressive, really.

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4 points

US conservatives right there behind ya.

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27 points

Then they can point how useless the government is and get back in power

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5 points

No offence but isn’t a very similar policy about banning end-to-end encryption also in talk in the EU

Absolutely don’t agree with it, will be the beginning of the end for privacy but this is more of a European wide (and even world wide) push for a close to e2e encryption

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4 points

GDPR is basically encrypt your shit and you’ll be fine. If they are seriously considering banning encryption the IT sector might as well shut up shop and run for the hills.

It’s so bad the UK politicians actually use non MDM unmanaged devices so they can install whichever app they see fit. Tiktok you name it.

We won a physical war via encryption and we’ll lose a digital one without it.

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1 point

I do seem to recall that some countries petitioned a weakening of e2ee. Some other countries through were firmly against it, so it seems it has lead to nowhere. For sure something to be aware of.

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85 points

There are a lot of things to hate about Apple, but this I can get behind. Get people using 3rd party messaging apps too! Preferably ones with e2e encryption.

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20 points

Plenty of people in the UK/Europe use third party apps already, iMessage is certainly less of a big deal than it is in the US.

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5 points

Don’t forget canada. So many people here use imessage or whatsapp

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2 points

For sure. I live in Asia, and the Green vs Blue bubble thing that probably only exists in the US is just so mind boggling to me.

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1 point

I live in germany and I don’t know a single person that uses SMS or iMessage. Almost everyone here uses WhatsApp.

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2 points

WhatsApp isn’t much better. It’s owned by Meta afterall!

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9 points

i can recommend signal

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8 points

Element is on the App Store

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