Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of companies and what they can share or remain private in relation to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to have privacy in all of the systems to begin with.

Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to improve their products. And since they have no extra motivation since they don't make more or less money (because Siri and Alexa are loss leaders) they will have no extra considerations of privacy regardless.

Comparing Signal to protonmail is a much more interesting problem and you can go on to what has been subpoena from Signal and protonmail. Since there was one actually disclosed we can see the information (or really lack of) that was given by Signal [1] . We have a statement by proton mail on what can be subpoena [2] but there have been arguments against it.

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ [2] https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement [3] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...

Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor.

This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the window, see OpenAI partnership).

On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy. The bar is so low as to be non-existent

OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line with their practices so far.

The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say, Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi polloi - so they need features to plausibly differentiate along these lines. And privacy is one thing that they know Google will never be able to offer, given its business model, so it makes perfect sense for Apple to double down on that.

(Ironically, this means that Apple users benefit from Android being the dominant platform.)

That is kind of proving OPs point, though: the differentiating factor isn’t actual privacy, it’s an impression of privacy that you’re sold; the warm, fuzzy feeling that you’re using a superior product because you’re special and this phone is for special people that have important data that needs to be protected, and as a manufacturer of special people devices, Apple obviously takes care of this—because you’re important, duh!

If they can get away with appearing to care about privacy instead of actually doing so, they will. That’s all it takes to look better than Google.

You don't even have to make the argument that Apple is untrustworthy. The stronger argument is that you can't know what Apple will be like in the future, or even if they will still be independent (which seems far fetched since they're so big) or a division that deals with user data won't get sold off with the data even if it's to a respectable company, because that company may eventually sell if to a slightly less respectable company, and repeat.

The risk for PII being utilized nefariously never goes away as long as it exists, so the only same stance is to not allow it to exist in others handle if at all possible. It's the same reason you don't share your banking credentials with your friends. Sure, you might trust them, but you can't know the future, so why even expose yourself to risk you don't have to?

That is true, but the catch is that reputation is very easy to lose and very hard to gain.

> Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-driving factor.

> This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it hurts profit

This is the important thing I'm always trying to note to people that think incentives are enough (as I used to). You can never know what the incentives of the company will be 5, 10, 15 years from now, or whether that company or division will exist or have been sold to some other company.

Incentives based on current conditions only matter for outcomes that don't have ramaifications far into the future. That's definitely not data collection and privacy, where you could find that 10 years worth of collected information about you has been sold at some future date.

And lest anyone think they can predict the stance a company will have on a topic a decade or two later, all I can say is that any example someone can point to of a company that has stayed the course we can easily look at point in history where a series of events could have gone the other way and they would be close to being bought out if not defunct. Even Apple had a period where they were bailed out by investment from Microsoft, and many other large names of that period were gobbled up.

Always keep in mind, Sun was an amazing company with amazing products and engineers that embraced open source and competed with Microsoft in the enterprise market, and eventually after declining they got bought by Oracle.

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