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I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives l

I'm a little discouraged when I see articles like this that seem to be completely tuned for developers or look over completely decent pro-privacy alternatives like Apple. For example, the "best" calendar alternative is Etar which looks to a Github repo. Really? At the very least you could mention Apple Calendar. Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? I'm not a fan of hooktube either - it just further cements YouTube's monopoly. I think what what bothers me is that "privacy focused" tends to be conflated with FOSS. I'm really thankful for organizations like Mozilla and Signal that are trying to deliver privacy focused applications to real people. However I also think we should recognize Apple-like companies who are also privacy focused without necessarily being FOSS. I think that will help move more non-technical people out of central databases.

stef25 8y ago
> Maps.Me Has several useful functions like being able to pre-download specific countries or parts of specific countries. Many mapping apps work offline but the way Maps.me lets you specifically pick & choose areas = more user friendly. It uses Openstreetmaps which I've found to work amazingly well in areas where you wouldn't expect (it has off-road trails in remote areas of Vietnam for example) via iTunes I can also import gpx tracks (or gpx converted to kml, I forget) for things like mountainbike routes, which works super well.
AtomicOrbital 8y ago
I am on linux ... just tried Apple Maps - horrid ... it fails to permit location search by zip code ... just show the globe and let me zoom around - fail ... forced me to login - fail ... unable to enter arbitrary address - talk about slurping personal data ... unbelievably evil
- saagarjha 8y ago
  What are you going on about? Apple Maps does all of those things, without asking for login information.
lev99 8y ago
I thought it was strange bing was not mentioned, even though it has Mozilla's endorsement of having a better privacy policy than Google[0] and is probably the most popular alternative to search in the United States. This far from a complete list of Google alternatives. [0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing_over_google_privacy_issues.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing...
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  As much as I like Microsoft, Bing is awful. Ive used it, and I tried to like it. It can't find anything.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    It was also disappointing to hear recently one of their developers say that they mostly just copy what Google is doing to keep up.
  - lev99 8y ago
    I find bing to be better than any other Google alternatives.
    - auslander 8y ago
      agree
    - Godel_unicode 8y ago
      It would be possible for you and your parent comment to be correct simultaneously.
  - astronautjones 8y ago
    Bing's video search (particularly for porn) is the best in the business.
    - beagle3 8y ago
theamk 8y ago
I don't see that in the article. Search, email, drive, youtube, maps all have many non-FOSS entries. I am fairly sure that no apple product is mentioned because replacing all the hardware one has just for more privacy is likely too extreme for many. Not to mention that one of the biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning, and apple does not make it easier at all.
- auslander 8y ago
  > biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning Very true. But there is no problem with apple, in fact Safari is first browser that is clearing cookies - ITP(2). I use uBlock Origin on Safari and Private browsing - no cookies at all.
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    Firefox has been able to clear cookies like that for years without any extensions.
    - systoll 8y ago
      Firefox has an option to block all third party cookies in the manner similar to Safari 1-10's default behaviour. And like everything else, it lets you clear all cookies at once, or manually look through the cookies to clear them. It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.
      - majewsky 8y ago
        What about the tracking prevention that Private Mode has had since FF 42 or so?
        systoll 8y ago
        Firefox’s tracking protection is the same feature as Safari’s content blockers. [the defaults differ, though], and prevents specific listed domains from loading anything. Except when it turns out blocking them breaks too much. Like Youtube embeds. Safari’s tracking prevention applies to things that do wind up getting loaded, and limits access to their own cookies/context. [kind of like loading all those embeds in seperate private sessions, even though they're on the same page]
z_free 8y ago
But then you have no protection against Apple, privacy wise.
swetabhsuman007 8y ago
14M Users affected by Facebook Privacy Bug that makes Posts Public
zavi 8y ago
Apple is a US based company. The point of this post is to try and hurt American hegemony in tech and promote European alternatives. Europe desperately needs it given a dangerously old population and increasing irrelevance of its tech industry, with GDPR being yet another populist nail in the coffin. Method of choice is thru soft power - swaying opinions on HN, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media.
amelius 8y ago
Apple is closed source, so we really don't know if they respect our privacy now, and in the future. Also, they may work with the US government, even if they say otherwise, and people from both the US and other countries may not like that idea.
cosmojg 8y ago
It's not that "privacy-focused" tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code. This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.
- citrablue 8y ago
  This is true iff you look through the code yourself, or are willing to trust that others have done so in as thorough a manner as your use case (attack vectors) necessitate. Apple isn't worth consideration if you are willing to put in the effort, or delegate trust, to other systems. If you'd prefer to delegate trust to them, how is that effectively different that FOSS that you haven't examined?
  - extralego 8y ago
    Incentive. When devs announce how their software handles privacy concerns, they have an incentive to be honest because all it takes is one discovery of conflicting code and their trust is lost. But if the code is closed source, that incentive for honesty is removed. Of course the media can still seek circumstantial evidence and make accusations, but that’s a far cry from version control. Separately, closed source code invites new incentives to disrespect user privacy for profit. So, there are these two major categories involved, both of which are mitigated by opening the source code. Apple remains liable for both of them. All that Apple has is an observation that they sell hardware too. I guess we are just assuming they already make enough money from advertising as it is and don’t really want more. I think there is a significant difference.
    - millstone 8y ago
      Companies get hit with multi-million dollar fines for violating their privacy policies. So there's your incentive. I just don't see open source as better protecting privacy. See for example the telemetry in .NET Core or VS Code [1]. Users discover this stuff by watching network traffic, not through code audits. 1: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/16131 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/16131
anonu 8y ago
I don't disagree that Apple looks really good nowadays from a privacy perspective. They treat their customers with respect and don't sell their data.... until they do. How can you trust a single point of failure to "do no evil"?
- flafla2 8y ago
  Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. All of the ML that apple does for example is done on-device or is privatized [0]. This goes for all of their services that Google has built their business off of: Messages, Siri, Maps, etc. People don't respect Apple's security because they trust Apple, they respect it because Apple has intentionally shot themselves in the foot if they wished to sell their data in the future. [0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-privacy-at-scale.html https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...
  - mirimir 8y ago
    > Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. Huh? Apple potentially has everything on the device, just as Microsoft does. Maybe they don't touch it, at least intentionally, out of respect (or just prudence). But if I recall correctly, they accidentally logged all Safari URLs for a while.
    - IncRnd 8y ago
      iPhone also sent geolocation coordinate files to Apple, until that was discovered. As you point out, there is a lot more than just the superficial concept of privacy, such as the Prism program that had/has a pipeline into Apple data. Like any large company, there are competing forces of strategically enforcing privacy and treating data in a way that doesn't respect privacy.
    - sam_goody 8y ago
      Chrome has search and url in the same bar, and therefore needs to log all urls you enter (and their metadata) for the sake of logging all searches. Absolutely benign, right? Safari shares the same url/search bar, but I have not read their license. Would be pretty surprised if they are not logging all URLs.
trumped 8y ago
It's better to host your own content if you want to have a better chance at privacy.
thdxr 8y ago
There is a difference between privacy by charity and privacy by design
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I know it's not exactly your point, but Etar is pretty nice, and apparently is cross-platform (Android & iOS - which I didn't know), and exists on F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/), Google Play (it seems somehow wrong to link to the Google Play Store given the context, but it's easy to find there anyway), and Apple's App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8). I think OsmAnd(~) [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/] is probably a better choice than Maps.Me. Given that alternatives to Google products are largely services rather than software run locally on one's own machine, you're probably right about the partial orthogonality of FOSS here since it can be hard to verify that the remote server is in fact running the software it claims it is, and from a privacy-standpoint it may be somewhat irrelevant (I recall even the FSF said something of the sort).
- bubblethink 8y ago
  There is a fork of maps.me on f-droid that strips out analytics/ads/proprietary bits. It's called omim (https://gitlab.com/axet/omim https://gitlab.com/axet/omim).
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    On F-Droid it's just called Maps though: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/
izacus 8y ago
Apple iCloud privacy policy mirrors Google's. You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. Apple also regularly gives iCloud data dumps to US government (they approved and delivered data in about 80% of US Government requests in 2017: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-transparency-report/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-trans... ) (The exceptions here are iMessage and phone backups which are E2E encrypted.)
- nemothekid 8y ago
  You mentioned the exceptions - both of which didn't happen 5 years ago. Is it crazy to believe that we may have Tarnsap-like storage from Apple in a few years. Side note: I don't think Apple will ever encrypt iCloud iPhone backups because that would make it difficult to use them (how would you restore an iPhone backup to a new device if your old one was incinerated? Your private key would be gone)
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    Best I can tell, they already encrypt a whole load more and are ready to encrypt everything. When setting up a new iPhone, I’m asked to enter my Apple ID, password, approve via an existing device, provide 2FA and then provide the PIN or password of that existing device. After all that, access is granted. To me, this suggests they’re already encrypting in such a way that while it may be brute force-able, it’s unlikely to be data they can read by default.
- alsetmusic 8y ago
  > You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. This seems so deliberately wrong that I shouldn’t respond, but I will. Quick and easy synchronization of contacts, calendars, and photos are all features that I appreciate. What’s more, my fearful-of-technology brother tells me how useful they are to him. He mentioned photo sync as a benefit only a few days ago.
  - ariwilson 8y ago
IloveHN84 8y ago
But Apple services are still not privacy focused services and for most of them, you have to use an Apple device, which is still less than 10% of PC market and less than 30% of mobile one.
throwaway13456 8y ago
>alternatives like Apple I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs. When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it. Given all these experienced with Apple, to my eyes, Apple is no different than Google and I wouldn't trust any word of theirs as they've consistently been exposed time and again lying to consumers. So, I don't know where you got the idea of Apple being "entitled" to be in that list, but I'd say it's the right thing that they aren't. >pro-privacy alternatives like Apple I don't believe this. There is no evidence to support this as Apple runs on proprietary code. And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers. Ever wondered how Apple gets its data for its Apple maps? For all you know, they could be collecting your location information to build their database. Isn't that a privacy violation? I work in the Analytics industry, inside an iPhone, using Charles proxy, you'll be able to see random requests hit Apple's servers from time to time. For all you know, this could be info about you. You can't prove it nor disprove it. I would never dare put all my trust into a single for-profit corporation whose sole goal is to maximize revenues and has been consistently exposed for unethical practices to its customers. So, hope that answers why Apple isn't exactly a consideration. [1] http://bgr.com/2017/12/28/iphone-battery-apple-apology-letter-battery-replacement/ http://bgr.com/2017/12/28/iphone-battery-apple-apology-lette... [2] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/apple-bendgate-internal-documents-iphone-6-plus https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a... [3] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/07/class-action-lawsuit-apple-watch/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/07/class-action-lawsuit-apple-wa...
- nemothekid 8y ago
  >And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as well be mud. This article is about alternatives to Google on the basis of privacy. Isn't a company that doesn't base its core business model on mining your data an improvement for a vast majority of users?
dmos62 8y ago
I've been using startpage.com to search Google anonymously for the past year. Startpage proxies your query to google and back while leaving off the identifying metadata, making the query anonymous. At first you notice the slight increase in roundtrip time, but quickly get used to it. I find Google Search to have a better search engine than any alternative I've tried, so Startpage is right up my alley.
syshum 8y ago
I trust nothing I can not verify...
Fnoord 8y ago
You are seeing a problem where there is none. Etar is just a fork of Google Calendar, and you can find it in Play Store / F-Droid (which is linked from the mentioned GitHub page).
rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
>Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? The "Maps (F Droid)" alternative suggested before the Maps.me app is a fork of Maps.Me that doesn't include any tracker/ad. It works pretty well although I've had a few issues logging into my OSM account and it takes a little too long to navigate "up" from a place search. It also features a GPS track recording function that Maps.Me lacks (AFAIK). It's really great and deserves more contributions!

stef25 8y ago

> Maps.Me Has several useful functions like being able to pre-download specific countries or parts of specific countries. Many mapping apps work offline but the way Maps.me lets you specifically pick & choose areas = more user friendly. It uses Openstreetmaps which I've found to work amazingly well in areas where you wouldn't expect (it has off-road trails in remote areas of Vietnam for example) via iTunes I can also import gpx tracks (or gpx converted to kml, I forget) for things like mountainbike routes, which works super well.

AtomicOrbital 8y ago

I am on linux ... just tried Apple Maps - horrid ... it fails to permit location search by zip code ... just show the globe and let me zoom around - fail ... forced me to login - fail ... unable to enter arbitrary address - talk about slurping personal data ... unbelievably evil

saagarjha 8y ago
What are you going on about? Apple Maps does all of those things, without asking for login information.

lev99 8y ago

I thought it was strange bing was not mentioned, even though it has Mozilla's endorsement of having a better privacy policy than Google[0] and is probably the most popular alternative to search in the United States. This far from a complete list of Google alternatives. [0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing_over_google_privacy_issues.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/184520/mozilla_endorses_bing...

miguelrochefort 8y ago
As much as I like Microsoft, Bing is awful. Ive used it, and I tried to like it. It can't find anything.
- mtgx 8y ago
  It was also disappointing to hear recently one of their developers say that they mostly just copy what Google is doing to keep up.
- lev99 8y ago
  I find bing to be better than any other Google alternatives.
  - auslander 8y ago
    agree
  - Godel_unicode 8y ago
    It would be possible for you and your parent comment to be correct simultaneously.
- astronautjones 8y ago
  Bing's video search (particularly for porn) is the best in the business.
  - beagle3 8y ago

theamk 8y ago

I don't see that in the article. Search, email, drive, youtube, maps all have many non-FOSS entries. I am fairly sure that no apple product is mentioned because replacing all the hardware one has just for more privacy is likely too extreme for many. Not to mention that one of the biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning, and apple does not make it easier at all.

auslander 8y ago
> biggest things you can do for your privacy is ad-blocking / cookie cleaning Very true. But there is no problem with apple, in fact Safari is first browser that is clearing cookies - ITP(2). I use uBlock Origin on Safari and Private browsing - no cookies at all.
- IncRnd 8y ago
  Firefox has been able to clear cookies like that for years without any extensions.
  - systoll 8y ago
    Firefox has an option to block all third party cookies in the manner similar to Safari 1-10's default behaviour. And like everything else, it lets you clear all cookies at once, or manually look through the cookies to clear them. It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      What about the tracking prevention that Private Mode has had since FF 42 or so?
      - systoll 8y ago
        Firefox’s tracking protection is the same feature as Safari’s content blockers. [the defaults differ, though], and prevents specific listed domains from loading anything. Except when it turns out blocking them breaks too much. Like Youtube embeds. Safari’s tracking prevention applies to things that do wind up getting loaded, and limits access to their own cookies/context. [kind of like loading all those embeds in seperate private sessions, even though they're on the same page]

z_free 8y ago

But then you have no protection against Apple, privacy wise.

swetabhsuman007 8y ago

14M Users affected by Facebook Privacy Bug that makes Posts Public

zavi 8y ago

Apple is a US based company. The point of this post is to try and hurt American hegemony in tech and promote European alternatives. Europe desperately needs it given a dangerously old population and increasing irrelevance of its tech industry, with GDPR being yet another populist nail in the coffin. Method of choice is thru soft power - swaying opinions on HN, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media.

amelius 8y ago

Apple is closed source, so we really don't know if they respect our privacy now, and in the future. Also, they may work with the US government, even if they say otherwise, and people from both the US and other countries may not like that idea.

cosmojg 8y ago

It's not that "privacy-focused" tends to be conflated with FLOSS. Rather, it's nearly impossible to guarantee privacy in proprietary software. The transparency of FLOSS makes it trustless. Want to know what data of yours, if any, is being collected? Look at the code. This is why, when it comes to privacy, Apple isn't worth consideration. All we have is their word, and that simply isn't enough.

citrablue 8y ago
This is true iff you look through the code yourself, or are willing to trust that others have done so in as thorough a manner as your use case (attack vectors) necessitate. Apple isn't worth consideration if you are willing to put in the effort, or delegate trust, to other systems. If you'd prefer to delegate trust to them, how is that effectively different that FOSS that you haven't examined?
- extralego 8y ago
  Incentive. When devs announce how their software handles privacy concerns, they have an incentive to be honest because all it takes is one discovery of conflicting code and their trust is lost. But if the code is closed source, that incentive for honesty is removed. Of course the media can still seek circumstantial evidence and make accusations, but that’s a far cry from version control. Separately, closed source code invites new incentives to disrespect user privacy for profit. So, there are these two major categories involved, both of which are mitigated by opening the source code. Apple remains liable for both of them. All that Apple has is an observation that they sell hardware too. I guess we are just assuming they already make enough money from advertising as it is and don’t really want more. I think there is a significant difference.
  - millstone 8y ago
    Companies get hit with multi-million dollar fines for violating their privacy policies. So there's your incentive. I just don't see open source as better protecting privacy. See for example the telemetry in .NET Core or VS Code [1]. Users discover this stuff by watching network traffic, not through code audits. 1: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/16131 https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/16131

anonu 8y ago

I don't disagree that Apple looks really good nowadays from a privacy perspective. They treat their customers with respect and don't sell their data.... until they do. How can you trust a single point of failure to "do no evil"?

flafla2 8y ago
Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. All of the ML that apple does for example is done on-device or is privatized [0]. This goes for all of their services that Google has built their business off of: Messages, Siri, Maps, etc. People don't respect Apple's security because they trust Apple, they respect it because Apple has intentionally shot themselves in the foot if they wished to sell their data in the future. [0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-privacy-at-scale.html https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...
- mirimir 8y ago
  > Apple doesn't have the data that Google et al has. Huh? Apple potentially has everything on the device, just as Microsoft does. Maybe they don't touch it, at least intentionally, out of respect (or just prudence). But if I recall correctly, they accidentally logged all Safari URLs for a while.
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    iPhone also sent geolocation coordinate files to Apple, until that was discovered. As you point out, there is a lot more than just the superficial concept of privacy, such as the Prism program that had/has a pipeline into Apple data. Like any large company, there are competing forces of strategically enforcing privacy and treating data in a way that doesn't respect privacy.
  - sam_goody 8y ago
    Chrome has search and url in the same bar, and therefore needs to log all urls you enter (and their metadata) for the sake of logging all searches. Absolutely benign, right? Safari shares the same url/search bar, but I have not read their license. Would be pretty surprised if they are not logging all URLs.

trumped 8y ago

It's better to host your own content if you want to have a better chance at privacy.

thdxr 8y ago

There is a difference between privacy by charity and privacy by design

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

I know it's not exactly your point, but Etar is pretty nice, and apparently is cross-platform (Android & iOS - which I didn't know), and exists on F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/), Google Play (it seems somehow wrong to link to the Google Play Store given the context, but it's easy to find there anyway), and Apple's App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etar/id1217625781?mt=8). I think OsmAnd(~) [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/] is probably a better choice than Maps.Me. Given that alternatives to Google products are largely services rather than software run locally on one's own machine, you're probably right about the partial orthogonality of FOSS here since it can be hard to verify that the remote server is in fact running the software it claims it is, and from a privacy-standpoint it may be somewhat irrelevant (I recall even the FSF said something of the sort).

bubblethink 8y ago
There is a fork of maps.me on f-droid that strips out analytics/ads/proprietary bits. It's called omim (https://gitlab.com/axet/omim https://gitlab.com/axet/omim).
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  On F-Droid it's just called Maps though: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/

izacus 8y ago

Apple iCloud privacy policy mirrors Google's. You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. Apple also regularly gives iCloud data dumps to US government (they approved and delivered data in about 80% of US Government requests in 2017: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-transparency-report/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/05/25/apple-second-2017-trans... ) (The exceptions here are iMessage and phone backups which are E2E encrypted.)

nemothekid 8y ago
You mentioned the exceptions - both of which didn't happen 5 years ago. Is it crazy to believe that we may have Tarnsap-like storage from Apple in a few years. Side note: I don't think Apple will ever encrypt iCloud iPhone backups because that would make it difficult to use them (how would you restore an iPhone backup to a new device if your old one was incinerated? Your private key would be gone)
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  Best I can tell, they already encrypt a whole load more and are ready to encrypt everything. When setting up a new iPhone, I’m asked to enter my Apple ID, password, approve via an existing device, provide 2FA and then provide the PIN or password of that existing device. After all that, access is granted. To me, this suggests they’re already encrypting in such a way that while it may be brute force-able, it’s unlikely to be data they can read by default.
alsetmusic 8y ago
> You gain absolutely nothing if you upload your contacts, photos and other data to iCloud. This seems so deliberately wrong that I shouldn’t respond, but I will. Quick and easy synchronization of contacts, calendars, and photos are all features that I appreciate. What’s more, my fearful-of-technology brother tells me how useful they are to him. He mentioned photo sync as a benefit only a few days ago.
- ariwilson 8y ago

IloveHN84 8y ago

But Apple services are still not privacy focused services and for most of them, you have to use an Apple device, which is still less than 10% of PC market and less than 30% of mobile one.

throwaway13456 8y ago

>alternatives like Apple I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs. When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it. Given all these experienced with Apple, to my eyes, Apple is no different than Google and I wouldn't trust any word of theirs as they've consistently been exposed time and again lying to consumers. So, I don't know where you got the idea of Apple being "entitled" to be in that list, but I'd say it's the right thing that they aren't. >pro-privacy alternatives like Apple I don't believe this. There is no evidence to support this as Apple runs on proprietary code. And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers. Ever wondered how Apple gets its data for its Apple maps? For all you know, they could be collecting your location information to build their database. Isn't that a privacy violation? I work in the Analytics industry, inside an iPhone, using Charles proxy, you'll be able to see random requests hit Apple's servers from time to time. For all you know, this could be info about you. You can't prove it nor disprove it. I would never dare put all my trust into a single for-profit corporation whose sole goal is to maximize revenues and has been consistently exposed for unethical practices to its customers. So, hope that answers why Apple isn't exactly a consideration. [1] http://bgr.com/2017/12/28/iphone-battery-apple-apology-letter-battery-replacement/ http://bgr.com/2017/12/28/iphone-battery-apple-apology-lette... [2] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/apple-bendgate-internal-documents-iphone-6-plus https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a... [3] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/07/class-action-lawsuit-apple-watch/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/07/class-action-lawsuit-apple-wa...

nemothekid 8y ago
>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as well be mud. This article is about alternatives to Google on the basis of privacy. Isn't a company that doesn't base its core business model on mining your data an improvement for a vast majority of users?

dmos62 8y ago

I've been using startpage.com to search Google anonymously for the past year. Startpage proxies your query to google and back while leaving off the identifying metadata, making the query anonymous. At first you notice the slight increase in roundtrip time, but quickly get used to it. I find Google Search to have a better search engine than any alternative I've tried, so Startpage is right up my alley.

syshum 8y ago

I trust nothing I can not verify...

Fnoord 8y ago

You are seeing a problem where there is none. Etar is just a fork of Google Calendar, and you can find it in Play Store / F-Droid (which is linked from the mentioned GitHub page).

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago

>Is Maps.Me (which uses AdSense) really better than Apple Maps? The "Maps (F Droid)" alternative suggested before the Maps.me app is a fork of Maps.Me that doesn't include any tracker/ad. It works pretty well although I've had a few issues logging into my OSM account and it takes a little too long to navigate "up" from a place search. It also features a GPS track recording function that Maps.Me lacks (AFAIK). It's really great and deserves more contributions!