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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Moving from Google cloud to Apple cloud, from Google messenger to Facebook messenger... What's the point honestly?

Apple is not an advertising company, they are a product and service company. Google gives free services in exchange for your data.

Facebook Messenger I don't get, I'd use Apple Messages over Facebook, or Telegram, etc.

>Apple is not an advertising company

Except when they are

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074

Apple protects your data.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Yes they advertise, but you are not the product on services such as cloud. They often cannot physically read your data intentionally.

They sell ads based on intrests and location. This makes them money. How are you not the product?

They actually can read your data. They abandoned plans to do end to end encryption [0] on icloud backups. When you get a new iphone you can view all your old messages which means Apple in all likelyhood has access to your private key.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2020/01/21/apple-reportedly-abandoned-en...

I'd much rather three different companies each have a slice of my data than one company have all of my data and be able to cross-reference it.

You have a valid point on Facebook which may in fact be worse, but Apple's business case is not to hoover up every single piece of information about your life and then sell it to advertisers. They are there to sell hardware and a bit of software. That different motivation leads to different outcomes when a VP asks "should we do this with info we have?"

Looks like they only had beef with google. Switching from pest to cholera could make sense to them

Having competition is good if only because it keeps companies thinking about the user.

Note I carefully said user not customer. Except for Spotify (and his email host) he is not the customer he is the product they sell. However in all cases he is a user.

I should have explained more here. This was only for family communication. Other communication is split up pretty much depending on where the friend is. Convincing people to up and shift is easier said than done. It could be argued it might be better that way because then my data isn't all with one message service.

For other communications I use Rocket.Chat for team collab, signal, keybase chat or sms(which if they do happen to have iMessage does convert). I definitely do not trust facebook any more than Google. And I would agree thats a sideways move not an improvement

One could argue that Apple does a better job of respecting user privacy, as it is not at the center of their business model.

WhatsApp is not Facebook Messenger.

A long journey starts with a small step.

Forward, not sideways :)

Critically evaluating your choices is a step forward.

Depends what your destination is.

- If you're going to "autonomy, independance and self-hosting", it's a step sideways for sure

- If you're going to "stop giving all my information to a central entity" it's definitely a step forward. Giving a part to Google, a part to Facebook and a part to Apple is better than giving everything to one of them, whichever they are.

Direction is up :) and "you belong to google" is local minimum, it's even a little difficult to make it worse.

There is no point since iCloud runs on Google Cloud infrastructure.

Even if this is true, there's a significant difference in that Google would lose nearly every single one of GCP's customers if it was ever proven they were mining data of their customers' cloud services.

And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting.

And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot less data when you use their apps. For instance, Maps data is never associated with an Apple ID, and significant work is done to fuzz and scramble the anonymous data they store to avoid it being possible to turn it into data about a real person. In comparison, Google Maps logs your location to your Google account every five minutes.

What is the difference between Apple and you as a customer paying for Google Cloud?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

The difference is between you being Apple's user and you being Google's product.

I never read Google discriminates between paying customers before. That's such a wild accusation that it requires serious evidence.

Edit: I can reply anymore but just supply a link of data handling discrimination between paying customers because that's what you imply by "there is not difference between GSuite customers and normal gmail".

It's bullshit

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

You're correct in that Google doesn't discriminate between paying and non-paying customers: It happily abuses the privacy of it's paying customers too.

Many of Google's uses of data are not specific to whether or not someone is using G Suite or consumer Gmail as far as I am aware.

You are not aware, because GSuite has completely different data use policies.

https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...

What Gmail data is being abused?

I can say one of the ones that horrified me the most shortly after I transitioned off of Gmail was Smart Reply. To my knowledge, nobody was able to confirm at the time that even paid G Suite accounts were immune to being used as training data. (If you have insight on this, let me know!)

I definitely don't want my email used to train Google's AI models, which might unpredictably cough up sensitive data since machine learning is pretty much a black box.

A big issue is that at any time, Google may introduce a new "feature" and decide to use your data to power it. I also think of how purchase data gets extracted from your receipts to store in your Google account profile and the like (https://myaccount.google.com/purchases although the text on this page has changed... did they stop?) and I feel a privacy-first service would need to at minimum have switches to control what kind of data processing is performed on their email, and default new features to be off.

I do know the answer. It's probably in the privacy policy for gsuite somewhere, but that's a long document. I'm unsure if I can share it though.

What sensitive information are you concerned about coughing up? While I haven't actually looked closely at how smart reply works, it isn't just a simple lstm on text, it tracks contextual info like recipient names, so "hey " on the first line will autocomple to "Hey Todd and Amanda" if you're sending am email to two people named Todd and Amanda.

So there's some tokenization and preprocessing happening, which would avoid most of the potential privacy issues I can think up with something like that (which are all of the form of automoplete linking your name to a private fact).

I feel like the fact that you are unsure if you can share how users' private data is used is extremely informative about Google's privacy stance.

Not really. It's informative of the policies on sharing confidential information, yes.

But it has nothing to do with what the actual policy on customer data is. My guess is that you'd be pleasantly surprised be the policy. I just can't find it documented publicly anywhere, so I don't know that I can share the actual policies. There are people who's job it is to share such things, they're like account managers and support people and they have guidance on the way the things they can say. My guidance is more like "don't unless it's clearly public".

Put another way, the training on data handling is longer than the training on corporate communication. So if I'm this careful with my communication, imagine the ridiculous lengths I go to with user data safety.

Bit of advice: If you don't know something, remain silent or say you don't know or ask a question. Don't confidently assert something you just made up.

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