Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Apple will probably get away with that as it is all in the fine print. But,

1. Let's not forget vast majority ( if not all ) of people on the Internet, inclusive but not limited to Main-steam Media, HN, Reddit and Twitter who commented between 2017 and 2021 thought privacy meant anonymous. And before anyone disagree, very very few on HN even bother to downvote or stand up against the notion of privacy meant anonymous.

2. Apple play this card, both in PR and marketing, along with media ( Submarine Article or not ) as a tool against Facebook. Or Social Media but let's be honest we all know they mean Facebook. And of course, for people from US, after 2016 Facebook is the most evil company on planet earth. Any Facebook bashing equals great.

3. A lot of people were brought into the idea of privacy meant anonymous. So in other settings, Apple use the word "personalised" instead of Data Collection, cough, I mean tracking.

4. The good thing about all of these, anything illogical will have to unfold some day. ( Just like Crypto ) Apple of course collect Data from you. Apple of course has all the Data about your usage pattern. So when some people came to realise privacy doesn't mean anonymous, I guess they aren't so happy?

5. Apple's true definition of privacy is that All Apple's user Data belongs to Apple. Any data to third party are by definition "Tracking". Since Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right, I guess the only choice is to give Apple all your Data?

6. Most people, especially tech nerds will likely play the I trust Apple more than Google card. Because Apple are not in the Ad business! - That was 2017 to 2021 if not 2022. They have their ads business right infront of you for a long time. They have been preparing their Ads business for a long time. Most tech nerds, or Apple apologist just turns a blind eye to it.

> 5. Apple's true definition of privacy is that All Apple's user Data belongs to Apple. Any data to third party are by definition "Tracking". Since Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right, I guess the only choice is to give Apple all your Data?

Are we so naive to believe that we are not be tracked by the big tech companies all the time?

If I use Office 365 Microsoft knows about my document writing habits and may be privy to company secrets if I had to write some sensitive company memos.

Google has the vast majority of my email if not all since so much email goes through their mail servers. Even if I avoid using GMail, I can’t stop my contacts from doing so. Google knows all my search habits as well.

Amazon knows my spending habits, the list goes on and on. And then there are the traditional means of tracking someone via credit card expenditures or your cell phone provider knowing your whereabouts and usage patterns.

You give away tracking data all the time. The issue is how these companies use that data. If they are doing something nefarious like what Cambridge Analytica did then we should be outraged.

Otherwise it’s just hypocrisy to play the blame game on any one company.

On the other hand, it's hypocritical for any one company to pretend they're better than the others if they still engage in the same data tracking behavior.

What are you trying to argue for? That we should all just throw up our hands and give up trying to protect our privacy? What course of action should be taken to improve things?

I’m arguing that the price for our technological advancement is the loss of privacy. It’s unavoidable. If one is not willing to bear such a price then they should completely unplug from technology and go live out in the woods away from civilization. Because just interacting with someone who is plugged in is a privacy risk.

All I hope is that the megacorp that I trust doesn’t go and sell off all my personal data to some nefarious people. What other course of action would you recommend to improve our privacy?

> What other course of action would you recommend

Regulation and enforcement is the only answer.

You cannot blindly trust in the continuing good intentions of executives who have as much power as Tim Cook does.

Meta and Alphabet are already committed to profiting from users' private information. Apple is not, at least not yet.

I'd be happy to have laws that enforce (at a minimum) the natural implications of the good behavior that Apple has claimed in marketing for years. But this would destroy Google and Facebook.

You are generally right that most of those proprietary products and platforms track you to different degrees. They are not transparent about how they use it. I can attest that many of have been off all of these for years other than when we are forced by workplaces to use them. You may be like many people who are unaware of the alternatives because they are free and not advertised.

I am aware of alternatives, but I was trying to come up with examples from competing companies that many people use. People don’t seem to be up-in-arms about all SaaS products but just those that are owned by corporations that they have a particular bias against.

But my argument is more that we’ve already given up a lot of our privacy by interacting with today’s technology. ISPs, cellular providers, credit cards, banking, the list goes on and on regarding areas where we have give up privacy for the sake of convenience.

I think you are touching on the aspects of scale (how much data collected) and harm (how it is used against us). Another important aspect is time since the older the data is, the less valuable it is to corporations and governments. Debate between which corporations are better or worse comes down to trust and PR. Some people believe that all publicly traded corporations are structurally incapable of protecting users over profits.

It is frustrating. It is clear that people won't sacrifice convenience, thus they will sacrifice their future. No, a "dystopian future" does not await us, it is already dystopian. But big-tech controlled social media is the only thing that most people understand of "the internet". And the discourse there is limited to the triviliaties of daily life, and then these triviliates are fed into the surveillance-capitalist machine.

>may be privy to company secrets if I had to write some sensitive company memos.

This is the thing that has blown me away as I've watch our privacy get flushed down the drain. When a handful of corps (not to mention Govt. TLAs) have access to everyone's data and comms, doesn't that enable them to spot and mitigate any possible disruptions to their business by upstarts?

> Because Apple are not in the Ad business! - That was 2017 to 2021 if not 2022. They have their ads business right infront of you for a long time.

If you look at their careers page, they have been hiring quite a few adtech talent in Texas for the last half year. I won't be surprised they are waiting for their competitors to die off before swooping in. Corporate strategy and PR teams deserves a raise.

> And of course, for people from US, after 2016 Facebook is the most evil company on planet earth.

You mean for the ones that voted against Trump in 2016 & 2020, and think FB won him the election (as opposed to reflecting what people who watch Fox News and listen to AM political radio talk think), not the flawed candidates who ran poor campaigns he was up against. Or the Electoral College.

Anyway, I know people who won't use Google but implicitly trust Apple for reasons you stated.

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