Hacker News Reader

Pick between the news headlines:

* Apple car found to have transported terrorists to sabotage Capitol building. Should those with morals be boycotting Apple?

* Apple refuses service to terrorists. Apple tries to hold the country together and keep peace.

If you were Apple, and had to pick between those headlines, which would you pick? When your company is built on your brand, it is suicide to associate yourself with something unpopular.

An interesting consequence of the "safe" possibility. You would not be able to just come and watch some events out of curiosity.

Several years ago, my GPS coordinates would indicate that I took part in a certain rather weird demo. The thing is, I just stood a few meters away taking photos, because some of the participants were ... bizarre to say the least.

I am not sure if this excuse would help me in 2021.

You do whatever you want and then ban anything and anybody publishing anti-Apple headlines in your platforms. Win win!

Who decides who is a terrorist ?

You’ve just handed over the role of government to Apple.

The Taliban and other less savory groups drive Toyotas yet the demographics who cut ties the nanosecond they catch a whiff of wrong-think still love the brand. In fact, they go so far as to spin it as an endorsement.

Why wouldn't apple get the same treatment? Its other products are known as high quality status symbols the world over. You don't see people up in arms because a public execution in some developing nation was filmed on an iPhone.

It might have something to do with the fact Toyata has literally no ability to enforce driver usage.

If they really cared, they would implement such tracking technology.

Its 2021. There is literally no reason for _anything_ to be sold without the ability to tell if $BAD_PERSON is using it and self-destruct if so. You're a terrorist if you disagree.

/s, but not for long.

So, how long before they have to address the current pandemonium of their vehicles roaming free on a generous 24-hour notice, given that Toyota's Mobility Services Platform is hosted on AWS?

Tbh the tech on those vehicles is really outdated stuff. No computers, no tracking chips, nothing.

Sourcr:- my Dad's 2002 Corolla is in Yemen

Why should that be important?

Does anybody care about the brand of cars used in terrorist attacks and boycott those brands? Also remember the Toyota War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_War I don't think that was bad for the brand. Maybe it was even good advertising.

Ask yourself why you and your friends and family buy certain brands. The reasons aren't limited to just price, quality, and features. Marketing is a rabbit hole. Few if any people are completely immune to it.

> * Apple car found to have transported terrorists to sabotage Capitol building. Should those with morals be boycotting Apple?

Why is there any reason to believe this would be a headline? Even ISIS using Toyotas didn't have any serious repercussions for Toyota.

I know cancel culture has gotten itself pretty ingrained into society, but this is flat out insane.

Once the ability to remotely brick a car becomes a possibility, people will expect it. For now, Toyota can't do a thing to their cars when someone else is using it, so no one holds them to that standard.

Nobody expects Apple to brick the iPhone of $BAD_PERSON

True. I wonder if something like this happens in China though.

You'd have to extend it to taxis, Uber / Lyft, and any other form of provided transportation.

Should the subway train skip that stop?

Or all the big tech companies could ban every journalist outlet that commits sedition by publishing negative headlines.

Apple is one of the most privacy-forward large tech companies and regularly tries to engineer systems in a way that denies them and central governments control over your data. For example they designed iCloud Keychain to work securely on adversarial clouds controlled by hostile governments.

They do very tightly control the features available on their products, so your question really hinges on how they will perceive automobile travel destinations: like features or like personal data?

(Also, HN etiquette tip: don’t complain about downvoting.)

Not quite. Apple has done a very aggressive marketing campaign to encourage us to perceive them as privacy-forward.

They've also done an admirable job marketing the specifics of what they do. What's left is all the places where they don't respect the privacy of their users because there's limited marketing value. They don't claim E2E on many services because they don't have it, and adding it wouldn't help marketing. My guess is some Tier 1 support person can drop in and take a look at the GPS pings from your phone.

But don't take my word for it. The Atlantic is far more reputable: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/apple...

It’s a bad article. The crux of it is Apple’s a hypocrite because they haven’t banned Facebook or worked hard enough on Maps. Give me a break. They just rolled out privacy nutrition labels, restrict geolocation, do more than any other platform. They’ve been investing heavily in maps for years.

Your E2E argument is poorly supported as well — “marketing value” doesn’t explain why it’s for messaging and keys but not photos and files. They have one of the strongest E2E encrypted messaging systems, it even works securely in China. There are technical reasons why E2E is not a good choice for all consumer data namely the impossibility of data recovery.

Imagine Apple closes your iCloud account for some vague terms of service violation -- and it bricks your (very expensive) car.

"after some time, loses enough social credit that the government decides to deprive him of the ability to use his car"

I know its easy to mentally walk down the dystopian road on this, but hasn't this always been the case? The only thing new is these policies are now getting codified using technology as society embraces it. Even from an apolitical stance, we as a modern society have always had mechanisms to take away a person's driving ability and car based upon a number of benchmarks based upon social behaviors.

The mechanisms were there, but ease of deployment mattered.

To compare things: you could publish a book in 1970 and you can publish a book now, but the process back then, with no text processors and digital printers, was much more complicated. To use an expression of von Clausewitz: "there was more friction".

A digital system that limits driving ability of individuals is much more scalable and also fine-tunable than its old alternative. For example, the government has many more intermediate options. It can choose to limit your driving ability to 10 miles a day only, then proceed to 5 miles a day only (unless you clean up your act, of course), or ban you just for 24 hours or a week.

These smaller, graded punishments would be impractical if they had to be enforced by human officers, but are perfectly feasible with remote control.

I actually share you're hesitancies but to play devil's advocate could these more fine-grained mediations lead to better policies in scenario's where those in control work for the greater good? Things that come to mind are reasonable speed restrictions on a driver caught going 50mph over the limit rather than an outright revoke of license or auto-detection of dangerous driving behaviors that could be punished with micro-fines. Maybe some would see those as a dystopia but it seems like you could utilize these to improve driving behavior as a society and decrease the need for overly harsh punishment.

I was also reminded of this patent, which has the potential to be applied in problematic contexts. https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2016/06/apple-w...

This is already possible technology wise with today's cars for years now. Could be wrong, but GM and Onstar technology can track where you've been and remotely disable your car.

What I can see is some geofencing of sensitive areas like we do for airports.

However, the down side is that unlike the FAA this might be abused.

Compared to this, my worry about Apple cars being glued shut seems unimportant.

I think it's still a troll question.

"What if Tesla or GM or Ford or Volkswagen ... "

Then people would sue the company for damages and their stock would take a hit. Done.

In China, this has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with the Government.

The tech companies are just ahead of regulation on this. That’s not to say, that banning the president of America, from a platform isn’t problematic or that big tech lacks the public mandate to do so. But that doesn’t change the fact, that right wingers can expect to see their freedoms limited if they continue to pose a danger to society.

I think you can expect to see the EU simentaniously work to regulate big tech and any platform that houses right wing terrorists. Just like it does with ISIS related networks.

It’s just that it takes more time for the democratic bureaucracy to grind into gear.

Man this post is so gross and I think a good encapsulation of everything going wrong with social/mass media. Hyper partisan, hyper biased, contains no facts, flippantly suggests mass censorship of opposing viewpoints, flippantly puts out massive blanket statements dehumanzing and generalizing half of the population, it reads like pure propaganda.

It's so "interesting" that you didn't consider what the left did this summer a "danger to society" worthy of repercussions, where they spent month after month rioting, burning down American cities, LITERALLY forcefully taken over a large chunk of a major American city and claiming it as their own autonomous zone where they make the rules, personally setting fire to multiple buildings on my block, looting businesses on my block because they were owned by "evil capitalist whitey", making me flee the city I had lived in for 6 years to escape their violence. No, there was nothing "problematic" with that. No, apparently all the politicians tweeting out their direct support for it weren't "inciting violence". The double standards are so sickening.

You sure make a lot of assumptions on my behalf, don’t you?

Let’s address them. I’m not left, I’m not even American. I’m European, which is why I’m speaking about which direction the EU is taking on this. We’re going to regulate big tech, because it, as I said, has no public mandate to silence elected officials.

We’re also going to regulate social media platforms, that do not moderate their content. We currently do a pretty decent job of censoring Islamic terrorism. Right wing terrorism is going to join it.

If someone creates a social media platform, that is used to plan left wing terrorism, then that will be censored as well. Riots running amok, isn’t really comparable to attacking the government though. I think in both cases, American law enforcement completely failed in its primary duty of keeping your country safe.

Whataboutism isn’t necessary though. You can be against both the BLM riots and the MAGA insurrection. And I’d argue that anyone reasonable would be.

I wouldn't call a mob that attempted to overthrow a democratic election by taking over our nation's capitol building -- a group that included, in part, terrorists with flex cuffs and guns and bombs and what was essentially napalm -- "uncouth." These are folks who we now know had advanced planning and in some cases wrote about their intent to kill specific individuals. And at least one officer died.

If they had advanced just a few minutes earlier, according to the timelines that have been put out, they would have gotten to members of Congress. A Republican member of Congress said that one of his fellow freshmen members voted against accepting election results because he was afraid people would kill his family. A Democratic member of Congress said that some GOP members have broken down in tears and are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.

If you want to argue about slippery slope, fine. But to characterize this attack on our nation as simply people being "uncouth" is absurd.