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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Moral conviction? No idea what you're talking about.

Lack of pressure? Whenever they get any orders from the government they operate under (like US National Security Letters or Chinese, uh, whatever it is the Chinese government issues) - they just comply with them.

"Apple a force for good"? Yeah, tell that to the Foxconn employees, I'm sure they'll be thrilled. Or, again, to the people whose data is made available to the NSA.

"mend the growing conflict between advertisers and users" - much of advertising is (mostly) hostile to the users, aiming to achieve results which are detrimental to them. So there's not much mending to be done.

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The fact that Google or Apple comply with a US law is not something that intrinsically makes them evil. They can fight it but they still have to comply eventually (if they lose). The choice is breaking the law. Would this make them less evil?

There are plenty of other things making companies evil. In short and perhaps superficially, it would be their tendency to choose to go against the best interest of users to make more money.

Google only complies with ~60% of government requests and frequently pushes back against suspect orders.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?hl=...

That's propaganda. I mean, it's probably true, in itself, but it's the 'small potatoes'. Why? Because, regardless of individual information requests, they funnel a copy of _everything_ to the NSA. All of it. Of course, regular government agencies have to go through semi-civilized procedures of spying on individuals, so they issue individual requests.

That's a pretty bombastic claim. Do you have any sources to back it up? Otherwise it's unadulterated conspiracy theory and FUD.

Here's an example of Google fighting a NSL in court https://www.wired.com/2013/04/google-fights-nsl/

"Google Takes on ---===[ Rare Fight ]===--- Against National Security Letters

Google has filed a rare petition to challenge a... national security letter... extraordinary petition... etc. etc."

I don't think they could emphasize rare and extraordinary more than that. Also, like I said above - they're still complying with funnelling _all_ data to the NSA, a practice which dwarfs the exercise of opposing some NSLs.

Finally - there's the fact that they don't leak all those NSLs. Why don't they? Those NSLs belong on WikiLeaks, for sure.

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