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Comment by Rohansi | Hacker News Reader

> It's a major selling point, for one.

That's marketing. Do you always trust everything in marketing material?

Apple has done more than literally any other technology company to limit their own ability to ever access your personal data.

Always missing from the paranoid lunatic side of this discussion: what devices do you use? I presume you do all your computing on an abacus?

> Apple has done more than literally any other technology company to limit their own ability to ever access your personal data.

I mean, it's what they _say_ they do. Do we know?

What's the claim here, that they are doing nefarious things that are undetectable? Because we know that this is probably the most scrutinized tech company on the planet, and we know that they've been caught and penalized for errors in the past.

Do you have any evidence to present, or is this pure FUD?

They invited security researchers to inspect their implementation of Private Cloud Compute. I expect there’d be a news story worth a good amount of traffic if they said it and didn’t allow people to do so. That there has been no such story suggests that there hasn’t been scandal.

(Or nobody cares about Private Cloud Compute)

It's paranoia now to question a 4 Trillion dollar company?

I presume truth and facts are important, no?

It’s paranoid lunacy to ignore the irrefutable, demonstrable work that they’ve done to minimize the data they can ever collect or access while conveniently ignoring the miserable track record of every one of their competitors, and to ascribe intentions to them that are in direct conflict to every intentional action they’ve taken in at least the past decade.

You can't install an app on an Apple phone without telling Apple, and you can't get your location on an Apple phone without sending that location to Apple. None of their competitors have this problem.

> You can't install an app on an Apple phone without telling Apple

This is a funny one because users need to opt-in to sharing app install analytics with app developers. You don't get to opt-out of sharing it with Apple, even if you're installing apps from a third-party app store!

Personally I don't deny those claims. I question their motive. Most people don't care much about anything except camera/microphone/location access, so why invest so much into engineering all of these solutions? Are they just morally superior to others? Or are they using the reputation they created for themselves to justify locking down their platforms? Because there are things only Apple can be trusted with?

They sell their own products to you and that’s all they care about. Google, Meta, Amazon and others want to collect a profile on you in order to target ads or more products to you.

With Apple, you are the customer. With others, you’re the product. It’s an easy differentiator for them, plain and simple.

It’s more of a fun anecdote, but people forget that there was once a plague of stolen Apple devices. Apple customers were frequently targeted by pickpockets, etc. because of the value of the devices. I have no evidence but I’ve always believed this was the root of the privacy focus - Apple could lock devices to biometrics and eliminate various workarounds, making stolen devices worthless, and the thefts evaporated practically overnight.

Phone theft is a growing problem again, but it’s still less common than it was because they need to get an unlocked device, and I don’t hear them targeting Apple in particular.

Apple has their own ads and personalization is enabled by default. Why not make it opt-in?

> They sell their own products to you and that’s all they care about.

You can also extend this to say that they want you to only buy their devices/services. If you have an iPhone then non-Apple smart watches are missing basic functionality such as replying to text messages. Force everyone to use Safari and limit it's functionality to force apps onto the App Store (30% cut!).

Now you’ve pivoted to an entirely different conversation.

No, I explained my thoughts on how I think they are connected in a comment about that one. One that you replied to.

> Apple has done more than literally any other technology company to limit their own ability to ever access your personal data.

Quite a bold statement. How do they compare with technology companies such as proton, signal... ?

It's a bold claim, but the amount of engineering effort that went into eg touchID is to be respected. Proton and Signal are important, but they're tiny in comparison.

No, but when they make claims in marketing material and then lie, it opens them to huge liability. So there is an enforcement path.

I trust that when they don’t do it perfectly, a million nerds are going to scream “finally! Gotcha!”

…while running far worse stuff themselves, the whole time.

Yet, most people fall for the E2E-encrypted iMessage story, while the Messages are only encrypted at rest when you have iCloud Backup enabled (I’d guess most people) and ADP disabled (I’d guess most people). The fact that I have ADP enabled doesn’t matter because most people I communicate with don’t have ADP enabled (or know what it is).

This is all only mentioned in the footnote of an iCloud security document [1].

Apple cares about your privacy, so much that they made a backdoor through bad defaults, well in reach of the CLOUD Act.

[1] Footnote 9 in https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

> Yet, most people fall for the E2E-encrypted iMessage story,

Most people don't even understand that when their favorite app that says E2E that that app still has access to the clear text before it's encrypted...

Yeah, you have to trust the app. The point is that they don’t have to do anything nefarious in their app, because there already is a gaping hole in the system.

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