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Comment by forgot-account | Hacker News Reader

It’s nice that Apple’s interests and my interests align. It always refreshing when a company puts a lot of effort into structuring their company in such a way that it aligns with users’ beat interests.

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Note: Above not valid in China

Know when to hold, know when to fold.

It's just co-incidence that they align on this issue, though. They care about user privacy because they happen to make most of their money by selling hardware, not ads or data. But ask them to open up that hardware and let you install your own OS? That's a no. Even something as simple as letting your preferred mapping software be the default.

Apple loves privacy and hates freedom. It sure looks like the only thing they actually care about is their financial interest.

Apple can make a very good case that your vision of freedom is in opposition to privacy. By preventing certain things you categorize as 'freedom' Apple can provide stronger security and privacy protection, they can limit the ability of untrustworthy developers to sidestep protections, they can make it incredibly difficult to set up side-channels that leak privacy, and they can set OS-mediated protections of device info (GPS, etc) that are difficult to bypass.

The fact that this privacy protection happens to be in the financial interest of Apple pleases me, because they are unlikely to sell out long-term interests in protecting reputation for short-term gain in abusing my trust. This alignment of interests makes Apple a better guardian of my privacy, not worse.

> Apple can make a very good case that your vision of freedom is in opposition to privacy. By preventing certain things you categorize as 'freedom' Apple can provide stronger security and privacy protection, they can limit the ability of untrustworthy developers to sidestep protections, they can make it incredibly difficult to set up side-channels that leak privacy, and they can set OS-mediated protections of device info (GPS, etc) that are difficult to bypass.

None of that is true. All they need to do is create an opt-out mechanism to over-ride those security settings that requires authentication. It's trivial to have both, they just choose not to.

It is also trivial to convince technically unsophisticated users to over-ride these security settings to get some ephemeral (and probably not even true) benefit. On the front page of HN today was another story describing how Facebook harvested a large chunk of contact info and text messages because people _gave it permission to do so_ when the app asked for it. Expecting these same users to be sophisticated enough to know what they are actually opting out of in this case strikes me as being a bit delusional.

So make it difficult and explicit. Or shit, just don't go out of your way to make it impossible. Android threads this needle extremely well. Installing a different kernel is not something a casual user can be tricked into doing. It requires a restart, and a moderately complex sequence of clearly dangerous actions. There is no epidemic of people being 'tricked' into installing alternate Android kernels.

Are you not conflating two separate issues here?

How is letting you install your own OS helping with improving privacy?

In today's world can you really decouple hardware and software if you want strict controls over data and hence privacy?

I'm not conflating the issues. What i'm saying is that Apple acts like they care about privacy, because it's in their strategic interest to do so. However, truly caring about privacy tends to go along with caring about freedom. Apple does not care about freedom, as evidenced by their device locking. Ergo, Apple cares about privacy only insofar as it benefits them to do so.

> truly caring about privacy tends to go along with caring about freedom

Only in your opinion. A non-free system whose vendor has an incentive to protect privacy may also provide even stronger privacy protection for the masses than a system that meets your version of 'freedom'.

> Only in your opinion. A non-free system whose vendor has an incentive to protect privacy may also provide even stronger privacy protection for the masses than a system that meets your version of 'freedom'.

This isn't a "version" of freedom. It is what freedom literally means. You can say you're willing to sacrifice some freedom to gain privacy, sure. But from a technical perspective, that's a totally false choice.

It is not a false choice from either a technical nor a philosophical perspective. There are positive and negative freedoms/liberties and each leads to different results when applied to a real world situation. You view freedom as a negative liberty (e.g. absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints) so anything that hinders your usage of a device in a manner you desire is contrary to your view of 'freedom'. Others may view device freedom as a positive liberty, where freedom is manifested in a way that enables them to take control of their life and realize a more fundamental purpose. If I view a computer as a means of accomplishing some other goal and not a tool that I need to think about much or to modify, but where the existence of such liberties can negatively impact my goal then your version of freedom makes me less free. If I need to spend time and mental energy wondering if some action I take might make my privacy less secure, if some app I install is a threat or a benefit, or if some action a third-party asks me to take is going to subtly invalidate a simple security model I keep in my head, then I am less free.

To dive straight towards the third-rail of this conversation, some people think that being able to go out and buy a gun makes them more free while other people think that the ability of other people (of possibly questionable mental state or moral character) to buy a gun increases the probability that they will be killed by someone else with a gun and because of this they are less free. Both are correct.

If only the market would allow us to make a choice as to which version of freedom we wish to engage in and would provide us with multiple competing platforms that represent alternative visions of computing and informational autonomy. If only...

> If I view a computer as a means of accomplishing some other goal and not a tool that I need to think about much or to modify, but where the existence of such liberties can negatively impact my goal then your version of freedom makes me less free.

How, exactly? Are you saying that the burden of potentially unlocking your device in error, even if Apple makes that a convoluted, explicit process makes you less free? If i'm misunderstanding your argument, let me know. If i'm not, I think we both know it's totally silly.

> Apple loves privacy and hates freedom. It sure looks like the only thing they actually care about is their financial interest.

Hates freedome how? This statement is overbroad.

In a nutshell, I would rather support Apple as they're primarily a hardware company that has stated their privacy interests align with mine. As opposed to me supporting an advertising company that happens to sell phones and produce a mobile operating system that seems tailored to do the opposite.

The fact that I can't install my own OS is entirely tangential to the overall company goals of Apple versus Google or even Samsung. Focusing on a phone platform to behave as if it was the PC platform of the 80's reminds me of the for want of a nail proverb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

Focusing too far down on "freedom" from the gnu perspective will just put us into territory we can't cover at all realistically right now.

Besides which, I just want to use my phone, not spend endless hours fucking around with it to install all manner of stuff.

> Hates freedome how? This statement is overbroad.

In the sense that their devices are not free.

> Besides which, I just want to use my phone, not spend endless hours fucking around with it to install all manner of stuff.

The fact that you don't want to use it that way is hardly relevant to the question of freedom.

Listen, i'm not saying they should spend a bunch of time engineering a solution to support this use case. I'm not saying they should aid people in doing it in any way. But that's not all they're doing. They actively expend resources to thwart people controlling their own devices. It is their corporate policy not just not to support this behavior, but to make it technologically impossible. That is the key point.

If Apple had just said "if you modify the OS, you void your warrant and you're on your own - we offer you zero support", i'd be totally fine with that. Personally, i'm not interested in modifying my device at all, i'm happy to leave it as is. But to go out of their way to make it impossible to do that? That's anti-freedom, no matter how you slice it.

The fact that they make it hard is what guarantees that there's a large pool of people with stock iphones. And this pool is too big a market to ignore, which is why I can have good apps, even from companies I don't trust, and deny them permissions I don't want to grant.

I think Apple understands this. The freedom you desire has ecosystem effects which I don't want.

You may quibble about precisely how hard is hard enough. Maybe they could loosen up a little bit, walk some middle path, and satisfy both of our desires. Maybe. Has anyone done it? Apparently people will sign anything you ask them to in order to play farmville. And every jailbreak seems like a security hole I'd rather not have.

I see no reason to think that making this possible would alter their ecosystem at all. It would always be a small minority of users. A small minority that developers could always just ignore. Developers on Android don't bother to think about custom Android kernels, unless they're specifically targeting that user niche.

I'm not too sure what exact freedom this minority of users is after. Does granting the ability to load a custom kernel require zero engineering effort from Apple? Including doing it in a way which won't leave the door open for the FBI, and whoever else, to break in?

It requires substantially less engineering effort than they've put into making sure people cannot do those things.

They are just preventing several potential headaches in their view. If I build something and I don't want end users to do X with it, I'm entitled to do that. If the user doesn't like it, the user can go elsewhere. Those are the terms I set as the vendor and you are free to not engage, you have other choices.

In short, you are still free to not buy their hardware.

Absolutely true. Just as you are free not to use Google and Facebook if you don't want your data collected. Not trying to say they don't have every right to do it.

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