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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with you in general but I wanted to say why I feel comfortable enough with Apple's approach. I looked at the privacy statements for Apple's health apps and the 3rd party sleeping apps. It is my understanding that all data stays on my watch and iPhone unless it is encrypted. My understanding is that only I have access to this data.

I would like to share some data with my doctor and insurance but I want that under my control.

EDIT: just wanted to add that I am also in general deathly against IoT devices re: tracking. I read Surielance Capitalism and took the book seriously.

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Apple is a for-profit organization that's free to alter their privacy terms any time they want. I don't trust that future modifications of those terms won't make all that data available to anyone who pays.

And even if they don't sell the data it will still be a huge attraction for all kinds of black-hats.

And the government is also free to change the rules depending on the administration in power. I can leave a corporation I don’t like much easier than a government.

That’s not necessarily true - realistically not using google or Facebook, for the average, non-tech person, is in many ways up there with moving from say, France to Germany (I chose the EU to make a specific point about ease of movement) in terms of difficulty.

Also, at least democracies have formal mechanisms for holding governments accountable, even if these mechanisms are often corrupted or flawed.

Living in a democracy means you have options beyond “voting with your feet”.

Even in the best case ignoring the effects of the electoral college, two senators per state regardless of the population and gerrymandering suppressing the will of the people. It’s fine when a democratic government having power is ruled by the majority as long as you are in the majority.

Look at the history of how the government treats minorities (racial, religious, non straight, etc)

I agree about gerrymandering, think the Electoral College is anti-democratic, and see you point about the way the Senate is set up (though that is maybe a bit trickier than the above 2 items).

But I feel like this is kind of outside scope of what we were talking about? The US is a flawed democracy, no doubt, and some political scientists argue it no longer functions as a democracy, but, it is still, both formally and somewhat in practice, a democracy.

If this is anything like find my iPhone they don’t have access to the data even if they want to. It’s all encrypted and your hardware is the key.

Except when encryption becomes mandated by law to be backdoored. Having the data distributed over multiple disparate systems is at least a major inconvenience for any attacker.

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