Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

I didn't write the article. I'm not professing to make perfect decisions. I just find the author's particular "line in the sand" amusing. "This lack of privacy is horrible, but I use Siri." It makes no sense.

View on HN

Selective reading. Full sentence is “I do use Siri on Apple devices. She’s not the smartest but I do have a fragile trust in Apple that their stance on Privacy is more than just marketing.”....author does say he has fragile trus.

I do not agree. Things are not binary. There are tradeoffs in everything we do. Such tradeoffs do not make his points invalid, they actually emphasize the limits of our control over privacy. I find it quite more honest and exhaustive than just winding about ads.

When it comes to the privacy respect I anticipate from the big three, I also have a lot of trust in Apple. Not unlimited, but enough to be comfortable. Amazon’s absolutely at the bottom, to the extent that it puts me off buying a Kindle Fire. Google… I trust but I don’t know if I should.

(I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. I don’t even know if I’m being unfair by not counting them as an equal of the other three).

It would be interesting to see user studies over which platforms they feel the more trustworthy.

Honestly considering the opacity of their privacy rules, it's all about marketing and how receptive you are to it. Apple does communicate a lot more about privacy of its users, but it is unclear whether they actually are objectively better than the others big names.

From a business model point of view however, I agree that it's clear Amazon, Facebook and Google make most of their revenue out of users tracking. It is not true for Apple.

Apple is probably still the least bad of the four, but their dealing with China doesn't exactly inspire confidence from me. If they are willing to include code to censor the word "Taiwan" in iOS, who knows what else they are willing to do to appease governments. Also let's not forget they are part of PRISM and seemingly lied to the public about it.

The other three (Google, Amazon, and MS) are straight-up spyware/surveillance and barely even bother putting a pretty face on it.

Huh. Oddly enough, my positions on amazon and google are reversed relative to yours. And, I think microsoft has a decent, but not significant, edge on amazon.

I agree. Using siri is way different than covering your face in public. Anybody who is even the slightest privacy concerned shouldn't have voice activated anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com