Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Now, Apple has taken steps to publish its own numbers, revealing that in the first half of 2022 the company fielded a total of 13 geofence warrants and complied with none. The difference? According to Apple’s transparency report, the company doesn’t have any data to provide in response.

13 geofence warrants for Apple vs. ~3500 (21000 from 2018-2020, averaged to 6 mo) for Google. That's a pretty stark difference. (I do wish they had/gave the numbers for Apple over the same 2018-2020 time period or at least covering a couple years for a more apple-apple comparison).

While Apple isn't perfect (plenty of fumbles along the way and still), seeing stats like this make me feel a little more comfortable with my iPhone compared to my Android.

My belief is that this is why we need a law saying no use of user information for any commercial purposes. With draconian penalties assessed per user-incident.

Bonus points awarded for legislation that pierces the veil.

So you want to play games and you "leaked" a million user records to your business partner? That's a million fines slick.

Oh, you "leaked" them to your business partner again the next week? No problem tough guy, that's a million more draconian fines.

We can play this game all the way to your bankruptcy pal.

We need to stop these tech companies from trampling privacy and the only way to do it is to hit them extremely hard where it hurts.

How about jail time?

Jail time?

I'd never dare to hope for jail time. But if I could get a majority of americans supporting jail time as well for these guys, man, that'd be, just, chef's kiss.

Seriously. I don't think they need all this privacy trampling stuff to make money. Apple makes a mint, so these companies clearly don't even have to trample privacy to make money. They just do it because "F you user!"

Who are those fines paid to? The government slush fund? Or to the people actually impacted by the leak?

yea a company's word that it respects privacy has little value. thankfully data harvesting isn't a profit stream for Apple so they see no need to collect it. Google on the other hand trades in data and would collect as much as they can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com