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Comment by chillacy | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if the ends should justify the means. Apple is the only pro privacy player in the space but they still run their developer programs with an iron fist.

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Personally, I want them to run it with an iron fist. I am happy to accept the limitations that come along with the trust I have in the platform. YMMV.

I’m going through App certification right now and while it’s a pain sometimes, man, you really need to be in the box. It’s actually kind of amazing how much attention each app gets.

Does that make you feel better as a user of apps?

Without a doubt.

If we have a modest app and it’s thing much of a struggle to cross all the t’s and dot the i’s... I highly doubt there is a lot of malware getting through.

Is Apple actually pro privacy? Or do they just brand themselves as that, while not really caring much about it?

I’ve seen it said before that Apple is pro-privacy because it suits them from a marketing standpoint. They tried being an anti-privacy ad provider with iAds and failed at it, so this pivot helps them.

A cynical read on the situation but it’s as valid as any.

The timeline doesn't work for that read. They were pushing their privacy credentials before launching iAds, and iAds failed as many predicted precisely because they wouldn't compromise their privacy stance.

Yep, Apple had trouble selling spots on iAd because the program had only very coarse targeting and shared almost no viewer info with advertisers. Apple wanted iAds to function more like newspaper ads than web ads.

I believe they care and they know it gives them a competitive advantage.

It’s kind of a stretch to suggest they aren’t pro-privacy, given the intentional features they provide: https://www.apple.com/privacy/

In my opinion, they are not so much pro privacy as anti user-rights. You can see that as pro-privacy yes, or you can also see that because they limit what users can do as much as possible. The privacy part just seems a side effect of the anti user-rights policies.

apple isn't pro privacy with respect to their hardware

I'm not an ios user but my understanding is that you can't install 3rd-party software on it (including your own!) without an apple account

phone home is always slimy

Sure, they care about security until the FBI complains and they don't encrypt your backups :-).

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