Apple Is a Hypocrite on Data Privacy | Hacker News Reader

Apple Is a Hypocrite on Data Privacy

theatlantic.com

35 pointscmurf18 comments

My summary: The Atlantic, rather than arguing for government regulation, argues for Apple to be the regulator. The argument is that Apple only enforced the contractual agreement, and did not enforce as a part of their privacy stance (which, to my knowledge, is not part of a canonical, enforceable document).

"Crucially, Apple didn’t ban Facebook from the App Store or the iPhone platform: You can still download and use Messenger."

AFAICT, Apple has no legal leg to stand on were they to do so. There is nothing in their contract with FB (assuming it is at least similar to the one us little folk get) that says FB has committed an app-banning offense. IANAL, etc., but this strikes me as the magazine's attempt at "but Apple's just as bad!" click-bait.

As I read it, their argument is that Apple doesn't do enough. And they cite the fact that Apple still associates with privacy offenders as their proof of Apple's hypocrisy.

So yeah, virtue-signaling click-bait.

Seems to distill down to this one line:

"Apple didn’t take a position on Facebook’s creation of a paid “research” program to extract data from users. It enforced the terms of a licensing agreement; appearing to fight for user privacy is just a side effect."

Expecting a stronger argument against Apple given the title of the article.

What's odd about that paragraph is that it's not an either/or situation. Apple can enforce a licensing agreement and fight for user privacy by having a licensing agreement that is predicated around user privacy. Which is what the licensing agreement does.

This article is ridiculous. Apple is not "merely" enforcing a contract, they're eliminating Facebook's workaround of the app review process, which is prohibited by the enterprise cert contract. It's the app review process that enforces their privacy rules. The whole reason Facebook did this was that Apple started rejecting Onavo in the app review process on privacy grounds.

Basically the author is calling Apple to be its clients’ privacy guardian. What if somebody prefers the much touted Apple design and is perfectly fine with his/her data being used and misused by anybody? Apple’s positioning as a “force of good” rather than another tech company hellbent on making profits, kind of encourages these “naive” interpretations of Apple’s marketing positioning. BTW how many units sold does Apple’s privacy stance move per quarter? If I was in Zuckerberg, I would give a free iPhone to those who adhere to the spy program :-)

So the problem with the walled garden is the walls aren't high enough?

Article title is "Apple’s Empty Grandstanding About Privacy"

Would Apple have banned the research app, had it been submitted to the Apple app store? And if so on what basis? The basis for pulling Facebook's enterprise cert is that they violated the part of the agreement that says such enterprise apps are for internal use only, while the research app was deployed outside of Facebook to regular users.

And to what degree does GDPR require Apple and Google, to take responsibility for the privacy safeguarding of apps in their app stores? Does it only bind the application developer, or does it also bind the distributor?

Arguments about the big companies ultimately devolve into whataboutism. But google does this! and Apple did that! And facebook did this!

It's frustrating how we treat publicly traded companies somehow as agents of morality. They aren't and never will be. Isn't it obvious that this needs regulated by a government?

In fairness, if you're waiting for your government to protect your privacy rights, you're going to be waiting a long time. They have a vested interest in circumventing the privacy of their citizens, (and circumventing the privacy of everyone else' citizens too in fact.)

I think the best you'd ever get out of a government is maybe a law that forbids companies from sharing data with anyone EXCEPT the governments themselves. This is kind of what GDPR does, but even that doesn't really have any teeth in it as we're starting to see. No one at all has really stopped hoovering up all the data they can.

The issue with Apple regulating apps that abuse data is that this now encompasses a significant portion of the App Store. So while Apple can and does slowly lock down the amount of data you can pull off a device, if they decided to pull every app that sent data off the phone they'd have very few apps left…

I'm trying to understand what you're saying - so lots of apps are abusing privacy rules, thus it would be a problem if Apple banned those apps because then there would be few apps left? Are you arguing that privacy abusers should have safety in numbers?

> I'm trying to understand what you're saying - so lots of apps are abusing privacy rules, thus it would be a problem if Apple banned those apps because then there would be few apps left?

Yes.

> Are you arguing that privacy abusers should have safety in numbers?

No.

The argument I'm trying to make is that the choice for Apple isn't as easy as the article makes it out to be. If Apple decided to remove every app that collected excessive user data, the App Store would be quite bare. This isn't something that I think users would let Apple get away with.

Ah okay, that makes sense. I think in this case, making an example of Facebook is probably the perfect strategy from Apple's perspective. It sends kind of a "shape up or ship out" message -- if they're bringing the hammer down on a huge business partner like Facebook (which has enjoyed numerous native integrations in Apple products) then they can do it for anyone else.

> ...like Facebook (which has enjoyed numerous native integrations in Apple products)

That was a thing of the past and doesn't have any value now. The integrations in Apple's OSes were removed more than two years ago. [1]

[1]: https://www.imore.com/twitter-and-facebook-are-no-longer-int...

>The issue with Apple regulating apps that abuse data is that this now encompasses a significant portion of the App Store.

Can you expand on this a bit? The original issue is not with an App Store app, but with an enterprise certificate that circumvented it. What other apps exist on the App Store that constitute this or any level of data abuse? I don't think the issue is with sending 'any' data off the phone -- Apple has designed around being clear with what data is going where as a feature.

> The original issue is not with an App Store app, but with an enterprise certificate that circumvented it.

The author of the article seems to be going in a different direction, specifically, the excessive collection of data in App Store apps. This is a hard problem to solve because this category now seems to encompass the majority of apps on the App Store, and Apple can't just remove them all without massive backlash from their users.

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