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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Hi Apple. Please:

• add VPN on/off to control center

• allow per-app VPN via Apple Configurator, without enterprise MDM

• once the above two are available, we can use Tor, IDS, DPI or pihole on a per-application basis, to reduce data harvesting

• bonus1: allow the open-source iOS MDM community OR the iOS Shortcuts community to make it easy for novice users to have one-click install of "privacy-plus configurations"

• bonus2: provide open-source code for on-device, silicon-enabled voice recognition using Neural Engine. In the meantime, allow anonymous (no iCloud login) use of Siri via Tor on a per-application basis

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You're addressing the technical problem but Tim Cook is addressing the political problem, which is more effective at tackling the root causes.

Dubious proposition. Many programmers work to solve political problems through technological means. TOR is an example of this.

And is Tor an example of a solution to the problem that has become widely adopted in society causing the problem to go away? Because if not then maybe a political solution to the problem is in order.

Another example is encryption in general. Once export restricted in the U.S. as munitions, the rest of the internet simply routed around that censorship.

> Many programmers work to solve political problems through technological means.

The real-world effectiveness of any technical solution depends on the political will to enforce it. Without no political will, technical solutions are not effective or enforceable, or even deployable. A political solution on the other hands eliminates the need to even consider a tech solution.

You can’t solve a political problem through technological means, you can only provide workarounds. Geeky, awkward workarounds. TOR is an example of this.

Have people forgotten arab spring already?

Bitcoin shook the world.

You absolutely can. Politics follows technology, not the other way around. At minimum, technology gives politicians new options.

That's patently false. If tech was the panacea you're suggesting, free speech would be the norm and there would be zero concerns regarding privacy.

I'm not saying it is the panacea, or that it only has consequences. Just that technology drives social and political developments, not the other way around. Our current technology does promote free speech[0], and does promote lack of privacy. That's why you see politicians fighting with the Internet on curtailing free speech, and promoting privacy.

Politics and social customs are all about taking particular spots on a landscape of choices. Technology shapes that very landscape.

- [0] - note how difficult it is to really censor anything these days, or curtail someone's audience; hell, if anything, technology is showing that ubiquitous free speech has some negative consequences too.

Problem: Buying something with a credit card exposes the customer to unauthorized charges.

Weak political solution: Thou shalt not make unauthorized charges to other people's credit cards.

Technical solution: Replace the whole concept of credit card numbers with a secure payment authorization flow.

Credit cards: Meh. That sounds hard.

[20 years later...]

Credit cards: Check this out! We offer a secure payment authorization flow! And your credit card numbers still work like they always did!

[Someday...]

Stronger (but late) political solution: Thou shalt provide a secure payment authorization flow instead of credit card numbers.

Many engineers worked to create a free and open Internet, but political power has been very effective in regulating and limiting the Internet.

Sneakernet is alive and well in NK.

Political problems tend to be much harder to fix than technical problems especially if you're Tim Cook.

(Also, political solutions are more likely to incur severe unwanted side-effects, such as, for example, making it almost impossible for any new operating system to enter the smartphone market ever again).

Also, the options Tim Cook has at his disposal go beyond technical solutions: in particular, it would be straightforward for Apple to switch to a pricing strategy that gets iOS devices into the hands of 100s of millions or billions of people who will stick with or choose Android if Apple keeps its current pricing model.

Here is a writer who estimates that Apple could sell the iPhone X at at 40% discount from its current (at the time the web page was written) price without losing money on the sale:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/11/08/apple-iph...

Rather than switching pricing strategies, Mr Cook apparently prefers to lobby the government to help him maintain the iPhone's status as a premium or luxury brand, which in turn preserves the iPhone's very high profit margins.

I’d like to see better sand boxing of the Photo album on iOS. Facebook, LinkedIn and others are known to raid your photos if they have access to it. Ideally you could limit their ability to read and write to just a specific photo album. Or limit write and read separately. At the moment your ability to enable and disable the permission is based on what permission the app requests and they show up together.

iOS has long had an API for allowing access to individual photos from the system photo picker. Unfortunately many apps eschew this because they prefer having access to all of the user’s photos.

That shouldn't matter. The OS should let you create a fake photo collection which gets shown instead of the real one to apps you don't trust. This idea is obvious and very old. At least in the case of Android contact lists people have been asking for this for as long as I can remember. Why has it still not been implemented on iOS at least? Or has it now been implemented? I've been avoiding both Android and iOS because of stuff like this.

Does anyone want to sell me a phone that runs Debian with the option of running Android or iOS in a VM with appropriate management functions that would make it very hard for an app to misbehave?

> The OS should let you create a fake photo collection which gets shown instead of the real one to apps you don't trust.

Many times yes. And even more important, the contacts!

Now it's you have to "give the app all the contacts" even if you know you want to give it only one or two. And of those one or two, just the number. Not the picture, not the date of birth, not the address.

In short we should be able to pre-select what any app actually sees of of all the databases, records and fields.

It sounds too technical but it could be done properly.

It could be done properly for us (techies), but this would go over poorly for normal people.

"Why do I have to click through all this mess when I just want to post this picture I just took to Facebook?"

"I think I set it right but now Facebook can't see the picture I wanted to post"

et cetera. These granular controls aren't something that regular people want to deal with.

Ideally, the user would be able to force any app that asks for photo access to use the photo picker. Otherwise app developers are gonna ask for full access, because they can.

There is an "add-only" permission, but it seems the app can override and insist on "read/write" permission.

While I suspect the same thing (why wouldn’t FB access at least the meta data from all photos), I wonder if you have a source or proof for that.

Also, how does that work with GDPR compliance if the UI clearly doesn’t ask for my consent that all photos are somehow accessed and maybe even uploaded?

• location data toggle in control center

This is my most desired feature in iPhone. Disabling location service, when you don't need it, helps with both battery consumption and privacy. I don't understand why Apple doesn't want to implement an easy switch option, unless they want to track your location for some reason.

I would wager they think it's confusing and possibly dangerous.

How many people would leave it on as they drive away from home, and then struggle with their phones as they're driving?

Apple doesn't generally expose more options than it thinks a substantial number of people need. That's a UX decision, not a "Apple wants to track you forever" evil business decision.

I'll admit I wouldn't mind an option like this, but I'm fine with three levels of location service controls for apps.

There are ways to make it user friendly. iOS can provide some kind of API that apps can use to explicitly request user to switch location services on. Just like permissions.

They can also have an option is settings to ONLY allow foreground app to use location service.

I bet most people don't want random apps to know their location in the background. They only want location when they know what it's used for (e.g. Google Maps, Uber/Lyft etc). If Apple is really so pro-privacy, they can find a way to stop apps tracking location in the background.

For the second point: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services and then set the app to “While using the app”.

That's not quite the same thing, because with that setting apps can run in the background and continue to track your location. Usually you want this (e.g., Waze), but not always (e.g., Uber).

No. That would quite literally be the “Always” setting... For example, for Messenger to share live location, it needs location sharing to be always, and not just “While using”. With while using though, you are still able to share a pin point of you current location.

I don't allow anything Facebook-owned to access my location, so I can't speak to Messenger, but perhaps FB simply doesn't want you to lose location sharing if iOS has to kill Messenger while running in the background.

Always: an app can always access your location

While using: an app can access your location until explicitly terminated by the user or the OS due to resource constraints

Never: self-evident

Fair enough, I seemed to have missed the background part from

> An app is considered "in use" when you're actively using it in the foreground, or when it's in use in the background, which the status bar will indicate.

from https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033. There is still the indication, but admittedly that is not the same.

Now that I've looked for Apple's document on the matter I'm more confused. I'd need some examples of what it means by "one of its features".

"Allows access to Location Services only when the app or one of its features is visible on screen. If an app is set to While Using the App, you might see your status bar turn blue with a message that an app is actively using your location."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207092

> add VPN on/off to control center

I really hoped they'd add this in iOS12.

I believe you now can use a Siri shortcut to create a button that goes in your widgets area that turns the VPN on or off.

Thanks for the tip. So arbitrary buttons can be placed in widget area?

Yes, I think. Check this out https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/9gocy9/we_can_finally_...

<deleted, replied to wrong comment>

…did you just reply to your own comment?

Not sure what happened there, was trying to reply to @mtgx https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18291227

It would help if they decoupled the so-called "end-to-end encrypted" iMessage from automatic backups to centralized iCloud servers to which all governments have access.

iMessage backups are not “automatic”. You must opt-in before they leave your device.

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