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Have used Android for years (I have been using devices like Pro, rooted, custom ROMS, skins whatever you might imagine). Shifted to Apple's echo system 2-3 year

Have used Android for years (I have been using devices like Pro, rooted, custom ROMS, skins whatever you might imagine). Shifted to Apple's echo system 2-3 years ago. It took me some time to get used to iOS but integration across devices (my mac, my iPad, my watch) is simply amazing. I am not going sound like broken record or fan boy here. Apple got me on this video where Steve Jobs really showed how much they care for privacy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo the other day my wife got a notification from Google Photos that it prepared our Album from our trip to SFO. We have turned of location tagging and everything, turns out Google is not content with me asking them to leave me alone, they would use ML and whatever they have built to figure out where I have been. In this day in age, while Apple might sound outdated to a lot of people, nothing can beat the sense of security with privacy Apple carries with itself now.

deleted 9y ago
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justonepost 9y ago
Interesting you say that. Android actually gives you control over security and privacy by telling you what your app API's get access to. iOS apps could be transmitting details back to home without your knowledge.
- chopin 9y ago
  Wouldn't Google be in the same position? They could grant their apps privileges without your knowledge. They build the OS.
  - justonepost 9y ago
    Oh sure, but google has everything to lose for leaking personal data. Rogue app companies simply have nothing to lose
- sjwright 9y ago
  > Android actually gives you control over security and privacy by telling you what your app API's get access to. Simply mentioning a laundry list of the myriad things an app will be permitted to do is NOT giving me control over security and privacy. http://cdn.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/03-Angry-Birds-Add-Permissions.png http://cdn.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/03-Angry... That's not control, that's bullshit. Apple got permissions right long before Android did: no third party apps have intrinsic permission to use the microphone, address book, location etc until the OS asks me on behalf of that app. And I can always say no if I want.
  - chipperyman573 9y ago
    That hasn't been the case since android 6 (they're on android 8 now). That picture looks like this now: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ximg_56130fa9b9c43.png.pagespeed.ic.kgfcXLkaa6.png https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ximg_56... It works just the same as iOS, where the first time an app wants to use your location/etc it asks android, which shows a prompt: https://uit.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/images/2016/08/30/access_location.jpg https://uit.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/images/2016/08/... And can be revoked as well: https://img.gadgethacks.com/img/81/78/63633813117897/0/snapchat-101-turn-ghost-mode-for-snap-map-keep-your-location-private.w1456.jpg https://img.gadgethacks.com/img/81/78/63633813117897/0/snapc...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - lvillani 9y ago
      iOS is different in a subtle way: once you grant an application permission to use location/microphone, it will show a banner if a background app is using it. Once you grant e.g. permission to access the microphone to an Android app, it can do so at any time without you noticing. Until you manually go to the settings and revoke the permission, that is.
      - tinus_hn 9y ago
- mlnj 9y ago
  Privacy controls exists both in Android and Apple platforms, but you can be sure of one thing: if you choose to save your data on either clouds, they have the ability to use it for their platform (ML, advertisement suggestions).
  - nardi 9y ago
    Not if that data is encrypted with a key that they don’t have. Which is what Apple does.
    - mosselman 9y ago
      True, but alas not for every service as far as I have understood it. I am particularly interested in storing my photos somewhere, but the details about the encryption have not led me to believe that Apple can't access my photos, which is a must-have requirement to me. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 It says 'encryption-server: yes' for photos, but around this table you have the text: " For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information, and only on devices where you’re signed in to iCloud. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information." and "These features and their data are transmitted and stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption: - iCloud Keychain (Includes all of your saved accounts and passwords) - Payment information - Wi-Fi network information - Home data - Siri information" So alas, no photos.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  > iOS apps could be transmitting details back to home without your knowledge. Erm, so could Android apps? You don't need to request permission for internet access anymore.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
vaishaksuresh 9y ago
>Google is not content with me asking them to leave me alone, they would use ML and whatever they have built to figure out where I have been Which is precisely why I stopped syncing my images to Google.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  What’s the alternative? Apples Photo’s app is perfectly incapable of syncing photos between 2 Macs and a phone as far as I can tell. It’s not cheap and I’m yet to see it work.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    I’m using it with a 45Gb photo library between a phone, a Mac and an iPad with zero problems. It does take a while for things to arrive at all destinations due to my crappy internet connection but for me it works quite well.
  - nkristoffersen 9y ago
    I have over 30,000 photos/videos in iCloud (357GB). Synced between my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad. Works extremely well for me. Set it and forget it.
    - binarysolo1111 9y ago
      Doesn't your iPhone capacity get full up? Can you selectively choose what is synced? Last time I tried (a few years ago) it was all or nothing
      - elnygren 9y ago
        iOS saves space by only keeping thumbnails locally and loading better versions on de-mand. You’re gonna be fine :)
      - nkristoffersen 9y ago
        Everything lives in the cloud. Once the photo has been uploaded only the preview is stored on your phone. When you tap on the photo or use the photo/video, the phone pulls the full file down from the cloud. You can set this in the photos setting. You have the option to store all content locally while also backing up everything in th cloud. However, none of my devices have the space for 357GB of photos so I default everything to “optimize local storage”.
Camillo 9y ago
Google Photos's automatic indexing of pictures is one of its best features. They're not trying to figure out where you have been, they're just saving you the work of tagging your photos. If you put your SF pictures in an album called "Trip to SF" in Apple Photos and sync it with iCloud, Apple "knows where you have been" just as much as Google does.
- icemelt8 9y ago
  That is true, their picture indexing is magical and I don't have any issue if they knew I went to SFO, I mean whats the big deal? Just a story, I took a picture of my car three months ago, someone asked me to show a picture of my car, I just went to google photos, typed "Grey car" and voila ... This is the future.
- dasil003 9y ago
  It's not really the same because if the NSA wants to know where everyone has been, something automatic that applies to everyone is of significant value, while trying to mine Apple's data of people personal folder hierarchies is worthless. Also, we know Google is actively engaged in mining this data in order to do something. Today it's to improve the user experience which I believe is an honest motivation, but inevitably this empowers a surveillance apparatus that both governments and powerful corporations want. I think it's worth pushing back a bit on the sort of standard operating procedure of tech companies today, and question where this is all leading. Apple are definitely not saints, but at least they provide something resembling a dissenting viewpoint on the issue of customer data privacy.
kissickas 9y ago
This is simply an example of Google actually providing you with a service in exchange for the information you give them. If your iPhone photos include the same information but they don't give you a (admittedly mediocre, I've never saved one) album which uses that data in exchange, you're not maintaining any more "privacy." You're just not being made aware of how little privacy you have when syncing to a cloud-based service.
- clappski 9y ago
  The Photos app on my iPhone does geotagging and creates relevant albums of trips away.
  - nkristoffersen 9y ago
    Yup! But what’s cool is the iPhone does all of that locally on the phone instead of on the cloud.
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago
      And it does not allow any app to export it once you archive your photos - oh, except for iCloud which is a super-expensive pay-to-play service beyond the first few photos.
      - matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Super-expensive? It’s $10/mo for a 2TB plan, which is less than the 1TB plans from both Google and Dropbox!
        NicoJuicy 9y ago
        Know that since three months it isn't expensive anymore, but it launched over 6 years ago. So it was 5 years and 9 months expensive, since 3 months it's not expensive. BUT, there is no 500 gb plan. So everyone who wants more than 200 gb is paying for 2TB. They are earning more, just in a smarter way
lillesvin 9y ago
Difference is that on Android you can use pretty much any photo app/service that you want. Nothing's forcing you into the arms of Google. I don't know much about iPhones, but as far as I understand you don't have much of a choice.
- vpol 9y ago
  You can even use google photos app on the iPhone. There is no limitation.
  - lillesvin 9y ago
    Ah, cool. But then I don't see why Android vs iPhone is even a topic here. If the original commenter installs Google Photos on iPhone he'll have to accept the same privacy policy. The underlying OS has nothing to do with it.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      There is no reason to discuss android vs iphone, it is the modern version of a classic endless troll. A privacy version of the godwin point is mentioning google instead of the nazis. Mention the worst known offender and you'll look better in comparison.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Yeah, I don’t know where you’d get that impression. If you want to use Google Photos on the iPhone, you can go ahead and do that.
  - lillesvin 9y ago
    As I said, I don't know much about iPhones. Thanks for clearing it up. Now I just fail to see why the underlying OS is of any consequence. Seems like the original commenter is making an "Android vs iPhone" issue out of something that has to do with a specific application — namely Google Photos.
sametmax 9y ago
Given that: - Apple was part of the prism program; - they denied it; - their platform is so closed you can't have remotely any idea what's it doing; I would put Apple in the same bag as anyone else and assume they give away everything and then make a big PR noise to pretend they don't. Only fanboys or naive people would believe the contrary.
- Gaelan 9y ago
  iMessage is, as far as anyone knows, end-to-end encrypted.* There is a macOS client, so it seems likely that any backdoor in the encryption would have been found via diassembly by now. * looks like Apple is trusted for key discovery. Abuse of this trust could be tested with the Mac iMessage client. That can’t detect a targeted attack, of course, but I don’t think that’s what you’re claiming is happening.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Openssl was open source and we still got Heartbleed. It's a long strech to think wd can audit correctly imessage by reverse engineering it.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I made a full circle. First, I was in love with iDevices. Then I was more and more uspet by their limitations - notably inability to directly copy content (music, videos, e-books) to and from as I wished. Mind you, these were the times that in order to even start using the phone you needed a computer with iTunes installed! So I switched to Android, only to discover you need to handle over so much data to Google you have a feeling they know more about you than you do. In the end I realized Android is just a data collection platform. I switched back to Apple, even though I still use some Google services (like Maps).
- Loic 9y ago
  If you take the time, but you need to be computer affine, you can setup your Android device to use non Google related services. This is hard work, you need to know about the implications of using one application or another and you have the feeling that Google is trying in every single dialog box to force you enabling data tracking options with dark patterns (like enabling location reporting).
- madez 9y ago
  You can use Android without Google. It's easy with LineageOS.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It's not. Unless you buy a specific devices LineageOS offers good support for, and even then it's only the start.
    - madez 9y ago
      There are a lot of devices that are supported by LineageOS. I lately bought one for a family member and the search did not take long.
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        I'm not saying it is hard to buy a device supported by lineageOS, I'm saying that other than buying a device for this purpose chances are your actual device or the device you had plans to buy are not supported. This happened to me enough times that I do not even bother looking up compatibility and consider lineageOS as not an option to save myself time.
benevol 9y ago
> At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. It is established knowledge that Apple has been for a very long time (and remains) a partner of the NSA's PRISM mass surveillance program.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  Not willingly so. Apple appears to be doing as much as it legally can to get around that fact, such as in providing end to end encryption on iMessage.
  - benevol 9y ago
    The claim that you have privacy when you buy an Apple product is still a lie. If you buy tech from one of the US big corps, you simply have no more privacy. That is a simple fact.
    - Gaelan 9y ago
      [citation needed]
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It can't do much legally. If Apple was serious about protecting privacy it would move operation to a different place where law actually still offers some privacy protection.
    - alien_at_work 9y ago
      >If Apple was serious about protecting privacy it would move operation to a different place where law actually still offers some privacy protection. Do you appreciate what your asking? You're honestly saying if they do something this radical then they're "not serious about privacy"?
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        Erm, there's a misunderstanding here. I'm saying they cannot be considered as being serious about protecting privacy because they operate from a country that has anti-privacy law. If they did move to a country with privacy protection then privacy protection could be considered possible.
1897234235235 9y ago
People say that apple is dead now that steve jobs is gone. They point to the fact that whenever he leaves apple, apple starts to crash. The difference this time is that he appears to have left a legacy and a succession plan. The other times, he just left and apple decided to run itself differently. Steve Jobs and other staff have engrained privacy into the company, and now apple are pulling it out when it is needed even though he isn't even alive.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  He did not left as much as been kicked out. Then again he did not engrained privacy but obsession with control into the company. Apple wanting to be in control of every aspect of everything means better apparence of privacy compared to the usual share with third party for profit. The explanation is that the usual is for services based on software who have nothing to sell while apple sells devices.
moobsen 9y ago
> nothing can beat the sense of security with privacy Apple carries with itself now. That is exactly it. Apple is not good at privacy, they are good at giving you the sense of it. A closed source OS, on proprietary hardware, where they don't even give you root access to your own device, will never be private. You pay them, but really they own the phone and you have to trust them. But they are obviously very good at making you /feel/ secure and private.
- jwr 9y ago
  As opposed to what "open source OS" on what "open source hardware"?
  - moobsen 9y ago
    My comment wasn't meant to compare it to anything else. Their nice words just don't convince me on a technical level and I'm surprised that so many people here appear to fully trust them. If their phones were perfectly secure there would be no debate if they are willing unlock the phone for any agency or not. It would simply not be possible and there would exist no security company that is able to do so.
    - bhnmmhmd 9y ago
      > If their phones were perfectly secure there would be no debate if they are willing unlock the phone for any agency or not. Total security is not possible, not at least by a long shot. Although, I understand your concern about why people trust these companies. While I don't know the answer just yet, I think one reason is that most these companies are located in Western countries where "rule of law" is considered extremely crucial. Openness about balance-sheets, government policies, and privacy are - to the best of my knowledge - critical in the US.
- hollander 9y ago
  Take my Sony Xperia phone. Is Android Open Source? I think it isn't. Is the hardware proprietary? OK I can root the phone probably, but then what? How can I trust the new ROM if I can't really know what's inside? Google wants to make me feel secure, so they do their best to provide tools to protect my phone and account. Now tell me what serious alternative there is for a modern smartphone? Firefox and Ubuntu have abondoned their phone OS, and they had no good working system that could compete with Android or iOS? Windows Phone? How's that better than Apple's offering? Apple seems to have the best arguments here.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
You know what else they launched in 2010 ( when this video was made) iAd.. It isn't successful though, so i hope you can read between the lines of Apple caring about privacy ;) PS. I'd like to see if they limit the knowledge of Siri because they care about your privacy.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Another comment mentions why it wasn't successful basically because Apple wouldn't give up user information and dictated banner size.
  - NicoJuicy 9y ago
    You mean statistics about who the visitors are? Personal information is never given out, so that's a bogus reason
    - adamlett 9y ago
      You are splitting hairs. What the parent commenter meant is that Apple refused to collect a lot of the information that advertisers were interested in to target their audiences.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Try integration across devices that are not apple's and you'll understand that apple is a hardware seller and this marketing scheme is to push you into buying their devices and keep you locked in as long as possible. The difference with other big players such as facebook or google is that google business is selling ads based on giving software for gratis and facebook business is being the parasitic middleman between people and their data / online interactions (also company) and scrambling to make the investor story time lie believable as long as possible. They both indulge in strong vendor lock-in. My point is that apple is not in this to protect your privacy or to defend humanist values but to get more people to buy their hardware for increased profit and shareholders.
- malthaus 9y ago
  Why do you care about the motivation when the outcome is aligned with your preferences (i.e. your privacy being respected)?
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It is a tell that it only appears to be aligned and actually is not. (Among my preferences is to not buy/use apple devices for a variety of reason: overpriced, battery life, short life expectency, lack of control and vendor lock-in, having to unlearn 3 decades of muscle memory, etc.) Where there is vendor lock-in there is no possibility for freedom and freedom requires privacy. Apple has a long history of being the king of vendor lock-in. My understanding is that apple does not protect privacy, it merely does not disregard it as effectively as the other big players because apple is different in the sense that its business is selling hardware. Just look at what the posted page actually says: it presents touch id as secure despite being repeatedly shown otherwise, it pretends a complex passcode is secure but it will not protect your privacy when someone is asking you the code with a hammer. It phrases things in a way to induce the reader into thinking apple does not gather data about users: "Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." which actually means Apple gather your personal information to exploit themselves and to give away or trade with third parties. And so on... Being better than the worst does not mean it's good enough.
hellbanner 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302675 ...
- alien_at_work 9y ago
  >In a free system, the users could have done this themselves years ago instead of waiting for Apple. Is this satire? If there's one thing the open source movement has proven, it's that without the backing of a business very little will happen. If there were some "free" mobile system out there, the only way it could work is if there was a "red hat mobile" type of company funding its development. Random "users" generally wouldn't fix anything just as they don't fix Linux/Mozilla/etc. bugs now.
  - Gaelan 9y ago
    Canonical (Red Hat, Ubuntu editon) tried to build a mobile OS. It got scrapped.
gargravarr 9y ago
Google are really starting to annoy me in this regard - I've been an Android user since 2010, never owned an iPhone, although I've owned Macs and iPods in the past. For me, Google are very good at giving you security settings and then completely ignoring them or resetting them to defaults when you're not looking. This in addition to, if you want to be able to do anything with an Android phone, even things that don't even seem to relate to this, you have to consent to giving Google more data to mine. You can't just turn on your location to allow your weather app (regardless of its backend location provider) to show you your local forecast, you have to consent to sending your location to Google on a regular basis. Granted, with most of the processing done on the Google cloud, it's probably unavoidable now. My current gripe with them, though, is that I specifically switch off my GPS. Two reasons for this - 1. is battery life. I have no need for my weather app to refresh and then get my pinpoint location (which it will, it just requests the most accurate location available from the subsystem) when the cell-tower location will suffice. 2. is that I have no desire for every app on my phone to be able to work out where I am at any time. On several occasions, however, I'll be in a commercial establishment (shop, restaurant etc.) and a notification on my phone will appear, asking me for further information about the exact store I'm currently in. I've been asked to review the restaurant or if I know the website for the fish and chip shop I'm standing in. How does this happen? Why, the Wifi-Scanning-in-Sleep-Mode option gets randomly re-enabled, of course. And because Google decided to log the SSIDs and MAC addresses of every broadcasting wireless network when they drove the Street View cars, this information is as accurate as GPS. Not to mention, I switch my wifi off when I'm not using it for battery reasons, and this totally undermines the point of having a Wifi Off switch. I keep switching this option off and Google keeps switching it back on. I'm beyond fed up with their total lack of respect for my privacy. There's also the fact that, not only do they go out of their way to figure out where I am, they then expect me to answer questions. It's like a man in a Google uniform suddenly leaps out of the nearest bin with a clipboard as I'm either waiting for dessert or walking out the door. I've experienced the Apple lock-in before with my iPods and I'm not keen to sign my life over to an iDevice, but I am getting to the point where they seem to be the only way out of this cycle.
andersonmvd 9y ago
The video you just mentioned is a little bit more than 3 minutes, without technical evidence and spoken by one of the best public speakers we've seen. It's ok thinking that Apple focus on your privacy but make sure to see some real evidence.

deleted 9y ago

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justonepost 9y ago

Interesting you say that. Android actually gives you control over security and privacy by telling you what your app API's get access to. iOS apps could be transmitting details back to home without your knowledge.

chopin 9y ago
Wouldn't Google be in the same position? They could grant their apps privileges without your knowledge. They build the OS.
- justonepost 9y ago
  Oh sure, but google has everything to lose for leaking personal data. Rogue app companies simply have nothing to lose
sjwright 9y ago
> Android actually gives you control over security and privacy by telling you what your app API's get access to. Simply mentioning a laundry list of the myriad things an app will be permitted to do is NOT giving me control over security and privacy. http://cdn.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/03-Angry-Birds-Add-Permissions.png http://cdn.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/03-Angry... That's not control, that's bullshit. Apple got permissions right long before Android did: no third party apps have intrinsic permission to use the microphone, address book, location etc until the OS asks me on behalf of that app. And I can always say no if I want.
- chipperyman573 9y ago
  That hasn't been the case since android 6 (they're on android 8 now). That picture looks like this now: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ximg_56130fa9b9c43.png.pagespeed.ic.kgfcXLkaa6.png https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ximg_56... It works just the same as iOS, where the first time an app wants to use your location/etc it asks android, which shows a prompt: https://uit.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/images/2016/08/30/access_location.jpg https://uit.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/images/2016/08/... And can be revoked as well: https://img.gadgethacks.com/img/81/78/63633813117897/0/snapchat-101-turn-ghost-mode-for-snap-map-keep-your-location-private.w1456.jpg https://img.gadgethacks.com/img/81/78/63633813117897/0/snapc...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - lvillani 9y ago
    iOS is different in a subtle way: once you grant an application permission to use location/microphone, it will show a banner if a background app is using it. Once you grant e.g. permission to access the microphone to an Android app, it can do so at any time without you noticing. Until you manually go to the settings and revoke the permission, that is.
    - tinus_hn 9y ago
mlnj 9y ago
Privacy controls exists both in Android and Apple platforms, but you can be sure of one thing: if you choose to save your data on either clouds, they have the ability to use it for their platform (ML, advertisement suggestions).
- nardi 9y ago
  Not if that data is encrypted with a key that they don’t have. Which is what Apple does.
  - mosselman 9y ago
    True, but alas not for every service as far as I have understood it. I am particularly interested in storing my photos somewhere, but the details about the encryption have not led me to believe that Apple can't access my photos, which is a must-have requirement to me. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 It says 'encryption-server: yes' for photos, but around this table you have the text: " For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information, and only on devices where you’re signed in to iCloud. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information." and "These features and their data are transmitted and stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption: - iCloud Keychain (Includes all of your saved accounts and passwords) - Payment information - Wi-Fi network information - Home data - Siri information" So alas, no photos.
IshKebab 9y ago
> iOS apps could be transmitting details back to home without your knowledge. Erm, so could Android apps? You don't need to request permission for internet access anymore.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

vaishaksuresh 9y ago

>Google is not content with me asking them to leave me alone, they would use ML and whatever they have built to figure out where I have been Which is precisely why I stopped syncing my images to Google.

lostlogin 9y ago
What’s the alternative? Apples Photo’s app is perfectly incapable of syncing photos between 2 Macs and a phone as far as I can tell. It’s not cheap and I’m yet to see it work.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  I’m using it with a 45Gb photo library between a phone, a Mac and an iPad with zero problems. It does take a while for things to arrive at all destinations due to my crappy internet connection but for me it works quite well.
- nkristoffersen 9y ago
  I have over 30,000 photos/videos in iCloud (357GB). Synced between my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad. Works extremely well for me. Set it and forget it.
  - binarysolo1111 9y ago
    Doesn't your iPhone capacity get full up? Can you selectively choose what is synced? Last time I tried (a few years ago) it was all or nothing
    - elnygren 9y ago
      iOS saves space by only keeping thumbnails locally and loading better versions on de-mand. You’re gonna be fine :)
    - nkristoffersen 9y ago
      Everything lives in the cloud. Once the photo has been uploaded only the preview is stored on your phone. When you tap on the photo or use the photo/video, the phone pulls the full file down from the cloud. You can set this in the photos setting. You have the option to store all content locally while also backing up everything in th cloud. However, none of my devices have the space for 357GB of photos so I default everything to “optimize local storage”.

Camillo 9y ago

Google Photos's automatic indexing of pictures is one of its best features. They're not trying to figure out where you have been, they're just saving you the work of tagging your photos. If you put your SF pictures in an album called "Trip to SF" in Apple Photos and sync it with iCloud, Apple "knows where you have been" just as much as Google does.

icemelt8 9y ago
That is true, their picture indexing is magical and I don't have any issue if they knew I went to SFO, I mean whats the big deal? Just a story, I took a picture of my car three months ago, someone asked me to show a picture of my car, I just went to google photos, typed "Grey car" and voila ... This is the future.
dasil003 9y ago
It's not really the same because if the NSA wants to know where everyone has been, something automatic that applies to everyone is of significant value, while trying to mine Apple's data of people personal folder hierarchies is worthless. Also, we know Google is actively engaged in mining this data in order to do something. Today it's to improve the user experience which I believe is an honest motivation, but inevitably this empowers a surveillance apparatus that both governments and powerful corporations want. I think it's worth pushing back a bit on the sort of standard operating procedure of tech companies today, and question where this is all leading. Apple are definitely not saints, but at least they provide something resembling a dissenting viewpoint on the issue of customer data privacy.

kissickas 9y ago

This is simply an example of Google actually providing you with a service in exchange for the information you give them. If your iPhone photos include the same information but they don't give you a (admittedly mediocre, I've never saved one) album which uses that data in exchange, you're not maintaining any more "privacy." You're just not being made aware of how little privacy you have when syncing to a cloud-based service.

clappski 9y ago
The Photos app on my iPhone does geotagging and creates relevant albums of trips away.
- nkristoffersen 9y ago
  Yup! But what’s cool is the iPhone does all of that locally on the phone instead of on the cloud.
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    And it does not allow any app to export it once you archive your photos - oh, except for iCloud which is a super-expensive pay-to-play service beyond the first few photos.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      Super-expensive? It’s $10/mo for a 2TB plan, which is less than the 1TB plans from both Google and Dropbox!
      - NicoJuicy 9y ago
        Know that since three months it isn't expensive anymore, but it launched over 6 years ago. So it was 5 years and 9 months expensive, since 3 months it's not expensive. BUT, there is no 500 gb plan. So everyone who wants more than 200 gb is paying for 2TB. They are earning more, just in a smarter way

lillesvin 9y ago

Difference is that on Android you can use pretty much any photo app/service that you want. Nothing's forcing you into the arms of Google. I don't know much about iPhones, but as far as I understand you don't have much of a choice.

vpol 9y ago
You can even use google photos app on the iPhone. There is no limitation.
- lillesvin 9y ago
  Ah, cool. But then I don't see why Android vs iPhone is even a topic here. If the original commenter installs Google Photos on iPhone he'll have to accept the same privacy policy. The underlying OS has nothing to do with it.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    There is no reason to discuss android vs iphone, it is the modern version of a classic endless troll. A privacy version of the godwin point is mentioning google instead of the nazis. Mention the worst known offender and you'll look better in comparison.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
Yeah, I don’t know where you’d get that impression. If you want to use Google Photos on the iPhone, you can go ahead and do that.
- lillesvin 9y ago
  As I said, I don't know much about iPhones. Thanks for clearing it up. Now I just fail to see why the underlying OS is of any consequence. Seems like the original commenter is making an "Android vs iPhone" issue out of something that has to do with a specific application — namely Google Photos.

sametmax 9y ago

Given that: - Apple was part of the prism program; - they denied it; - their platform is so closed you can't have remotely any idea what's it doing; I would put Apple in the same bag as anyone else and assume they give away everything and then make a big PR noise to pretend they don't. Only fanboys or naive people would believe the contrary.

Gaelan 9y ago
iMessage is, as far as anyone knows, end-to-end encrypted.* There is a macOS client, so it seems likely that any backdoor in the encryption would have been found via diassembly by now. * looks like Apple is trusted for key discovery. Abuse of this trust could be tested with the Mac iMessage client. That can’t detect a targeted attack, of course, but I don’t think that’s what you’re claiming is happening.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Openssl was open source and we still got Heartbleed. It's a long strech to think wd can audit correctly imessage by reverse engineering it.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

I made a full circle. First, I was in love with iDevices. Then I was more and more uspet by their limitations - notably inability to directly copy content (music, videos, e-books) to and from as I wished. Mind you, these were the times that in order to even start using the phone you needed a computer with iTunes installed! So I switched to Android, only to discover you need to handle over so much data to Google you have a feeling they know more about you than you do. In the end I realized Android is just a data collection platform. I switched back to Apple, even though I still use some Google services (like Maps).

Loic 9y ago
If you take the time, but you need to be computer affine, you can setup your Android device to use non Google related services. This is hard work, you need to know about the implications of using one application or another and you have the feeling that Google is trying in every single dialog box to force you enabling data tracking options with dark patterns (like enabling location reporting).
madez 9y ago
You can use Android without Google. It's easy with LineageOS.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It's not. Unless you buy a specific devices LineageOS offers good support for, and even then it's only the start.
  - madez 9y ago
    There are a lot of devices that are supported by LineageOS. I lately bought one for a family member and the search did not take long.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      I'm not saying it is hard to buy a device supported by lineageOS, I'm saying that other than buying a device for this purpose chances are your actual device or the device you had plans to buy are not supported. This happened to me enough times that I do not even bother looking up compatibility and consider lineageOS as not an option to save myself time.

benevol 9y ago

> At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. It is established knowledge that Apple has been for a very long time (and remains) a partner of the NSA's PRISM mass surveillance program.

danpalmer 9y ago
Not willingly so. Apple appears to be doing as much as it legally can to get around that fact, such as in providing end to end encryption on iMessage.
- benevol 9y ago
  The claim that you have privacy when you buy an Apple product is still a lie. If you buy tech from one of the US big corps, you simply have no more privacy. That is a simple fact.
  - Gaelan 9y ago
    [citation needed]
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It can't do much legally. If Apple was serious about protecting privacy it would move operation to a different place where law actually still offers some privacy protection.
  - alien_at_work 9y ago
    >If Apple was serious about protecting privacy it would move operation to a different place where law actually still offers some privacy protection. Do you appreciate what your asking? You're honestly saying if they do something this radical then they're "not serious about privacy"?
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      Erm, there's a misunderstanding here. I'm saying they cannot be considered as being serious about protecting privacy because they operate from a country that has anti-privacy law. If they did move to a country with privacy protection then privacy protection could be considered possible.

1897234235235 9y ago

People say that apple is dead now that steve jobs is gone. They point to the fact that whenever he leaves apple, apple starts to crash. The difference this time is that he appears to have left a legacy and a succession plan. The other times, he just left and apple decided to run itself differently. Steve Jobs and other staff have engrained privacy into the company, and now apple are pulling it out when it is needed even though he isn't even alive.

bigbugbag 9y ago
He did not left as much as been kicked out. Then again he did not engrained privacy but obsession with control into the company. Apple wanting to be in control of every aspect of everything means better apparence of privacy compared to the usual share with third party for profit. The explanation is that the usual is for services based on software who have nothing to sell while apple sells devices.

moobsen 9y ago

> nothing can beat the sense of security with privacy Apple carries with itself now. That is exactly it. Apple is not good at privacy, they are good at giving you the sense of it. A closed source OS, on proprietary hardware, where they don't even give you root access to your own device, will never be private. You pay them, but really they own the phone and you have to trust them. But they are obviously very good at making you /feel/ secure and private.

jwr 9y ago
As opposed to what "open source OS" on what "open source hardware"?
- moobsen 9y ago
  My comment wasn't meant to compare it to anything else. Their nice words just don't convince me on a technical level and I'm surprised that so many people here appear to fully trust them. If their phones were perfectly secure there would be no debate if they are willing unlock the phone for any agency or not. It would simply not be possible and there would exist no security company that is able to do so.
  - bhnmmhmd 9y ago
    > If their phones were perfectly secure there would be no debate if they are willing unlock the phone for any agency or not. Total security is not possible, not at least by a long shot. Although, I understand your concern about why people trust these companies. While I don't know the answer just yet, I think one reason is that most these companies are located in Western countries where "rule of law" is considered extremely crucial. Openness about balance-sheets, government policies, and privacy are - to the best of my knowledge - critical in the US.
hollander 9y ago
Take my Sony Xperia phone. Is Android Open Source? I think it isn't. Is the hardware proprietary? OK I can root the phone probably, but then what? How can I trust the new ROM if I can't really know what's inside? Google wants to make me feel secure, so they do their best to provide tools to protect my phone and account. Now tell me what serious alternative there is for a modern smartphone? Firefox and Ubuntu have abondoned their phone OS, and they had no good working system that could compete with Android or iOS? Windows Phone? How's that better than Apple's offering? Apple seems to have the best arguments here.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

You know what else they launched in 2010 ( when this video was made) iAd.. It isn't successful though, so i hope you can read between the lines of Apple caring about privacy ;) PS. I'd like to see if they limit the knowledge of Siri because they care about your privacy.

giancarlostoro 9y ago
Another comment mentions why it wasn't successful basically because Apple wouldn't give up user information and dictated banner size.
- NicoJuicy 9y ago
  You mean statistics about who the visitors are? Personal information is never given out, so that's a bogus reason
  - adamlett 9y ago
    You are splitting hairs. What the parent commenter meant is that Apple refused to collect a lot of the information that advertisers were interested in to target their audiences.

bigbugbag 9y ago

Try integration across devices that are not apple's and you'll understand that apple is a hardware seller and this marketing scheme is to push you into buying their devices and keep you locked in as long as possible. The difference with other big players such as facebook or google is that google business is selling ads based on giving software for gratis and facebook business is being the parasitic middleman between people and their data / online interactions (also company) and scrambling to make the investor story time lie believable as long as possible. They both indulge in strong vendor lock-in. My point is that apple is not in this to protect your privacy or to defend humanist values but to get more people to buy their hardware for increased profit and shareholders.

malthaus 9y ago
Why do you care about the motivation when the outcome is aligned with your preferences (i.e. your privacy being respected)?
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It is a tell that it only appears to be aligned and actually is not. (Among my preferences is to not buy/use apple devices for a variety of reason: overpriced, battery life, short life expectency, lack of control and vendor lock-in, having to unlearn 3 decades of muscle memory, etc.) Where there is vendor lock-in there is no possibility for freedom and freedom requires privacy. Apple has a long history of being the king of vendor lock-in. My understanding is that apple does not protect privacy, it merely does not disregard it as effectively as the other big players because apple is different in the sense that its business is selling hardware. Just look at what the posted page actually says: it presents touch id as secure despite being repeatedly shown otherwise, it pretends a complex passcode is secure but it will not protect your privacy when someone is asking you the code with a hammer. It phrases things in a way to induce the reader into thinking apple does not gather data about users: "Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." which actually means Apple gather your personal information to exploit themselves and to give away or trade with third parties. And so on... Being better than the worst does not mean it's good enough.

hellbanner 9y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15302675 ...

alien_at_work 9y ago
>In a free system, the users could have done this themselves years ago instead of waiting for Apple. Is this satire? If there's one thing the open source movement has proven, it's that without the backing of a business very little will happen. If there were some "free" mobile system out there, the only way it could work is if there was a "red hat mobile" type of company funding its development. Random "users" generally wouldn't fix anything just as they don't fix Linux/Mozilla/etc. bugs now.
- Gaelan 9y ago
  Canonical (Red Hat, Ubuntu editon) tried to build a mobile OS. It got scrapped.

gargravarr 9y ago

Google are really starting to annoy me in this regard - I've been an Android user since 2010, never owned an iPhone, although I've owned Macs and iPods in the past. For me, Google are very good at giving you security settings and then completely ignoring them or resetting them to defaults when you're not looking. This in addition to, if you want to be able to do anything with an Android phone, even things that don't even seem to relate to this, you have to consent to giving Google more data to mine. You can't just turn on your location to allow your weather app (regardless of its backend location provider) to show you your local forecast, you have to consent to sending your location to Google on a regular basis. Granted, with most of the processing done on the Google cloud, it's probably unavoidable now. My current gripe with them, though, is that I specifically switch off my GPS. Two reasons for this - 1. is battery life. I have no need for my weather app to refresh and then get my pinpoint location (which it will, it just requests the most accurate location available from the subsystem) when the cell-tower location will suffice. 2. is that I have no desire for every app on my phone to be able to work out where I am at any time. On several occasions, however, I'll be in a commercial establishment (shop, restaurant etc.) and a notification on my phone will appear, asking me for further information about the exact store I'm currently in. I've been asked to review the restaurant or if I know the website for the fish and chip shop I'm standing in. How does this happen? Why, the Wifi-Scanning-in-Sleep-Mode option gets randomly re-enabled, of course. And because Google decided to log the SSIDs and MAC addresses of every broadcasting wireless network when they drove the Street View cars, this information is as accurate as GPS. Not to mention, I switch my wifi off when I'm not using it for battery reasons, and this totally undermines the point of having a Wifi Off switch. I keep switching this option off and Google keeps switching it back on. I'm beyond fed up with their total lack of respect for my privacy. There's also the fact that, not only do they go out of their way to figure out where I am, they then expect me to answer questions. It's like a man in a Google uniform suddenly leaps out of the nearest bin with a clipboard as I'm either waiting for dessert or walking out the door. I've experienced the Apple lock-in before with my iPods and I'm not keen to sign my life over to an iDevice, but I am getting to the point where they seem to be the only way out of this cycle.

andersonmvd 9y ago

The video you just mentioned is a little bit more than 3 minutes, without technical evidence and spoken by one of the best public speakers we've seen. It's ok thinking that Apple focus on your privacy but make sure to see some real evidence.