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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

No service that uses a third party server can guarantee privacy unless they let you see the servers.

For common users the question is if you trust the server operator, and if not, to consider your communications insecure. What they do about that is up to them. And it is up to these providers to earn trust.

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The problem with this is that it eliminates the value proposition of E2EE, which is designed specifically to protect you when you don't trust the server operator. If you already trust the server operator, you've obviated the issue that E2EE ostensibly solves.

> No service that uses a third party server can guarantee privacy unless they let you see the servers.

And there are no services that do that. Since that doesn't seem to be possible. Open sourcing the backend doesn't help here since you still have to blindly trust the server operators.

Personally I can't trust apple for a specific reason... On iOS they've made it quite difficult to turn location services off unless you jailbreak the device itself. You have to go into settings -> privace -> locations -> on - off -> are you sure you want to do it? -> yes ....

I mean when a company does that, it makes it pretty clear that they do want to monitor your location, making it annoying for you to turn it on and off.

How is that difficult to turn off?

The steps, I am a privacy junkie myself and I want to have location services off most of the time, apart from when am gonna use uber or gmaps. Even for me that I'd go the extra mile to turn it off, it just puts me off that you have to go through so many steps to do it.

Not sure what you exactly want from Apple here. Nobody other than a handful of people are regularly switching Location Services on or off. Especially at a global level as opposed to at the app level.

And even then it's only 4 taps. Which is 1 more tap than what's involved in changing WiFi networks something a lot of people do.

Well on Android it's just a swipe down on the system bar (or whatever it's called) and a tap--from anywhere. So yes of course people are constantly turning it on and off, mainly because it saves loads of battery, but also the obvious privacy reasons.

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