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Here's the gist of the original piece (from 2014): > Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of

by apo 7y ago

Here's the gist of the original piece (from 2014): > Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build. ... https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience https://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience How the times change. Not a whiff of Facebook. Snowden who? Google was still mostly not evil. From the more recent article: > I argued in my essay that Tim Cook had conflated privacy with security. He may have. But in the five years since 2014, the following fact has become absurdly clear to me: there is no difference between privacy and security. Security is an illusion, just like the lock on your front door. ... In time we'll all come to realize that privacy is merely a special case of security. What can't be seen can't be attacked. Until then, a lot of damage will have been wrought on people too distracted or naive to care.

zdragnar 7y ago
Overall, I agree. It's a bit amusing, though, that the original piece wasn't far off. I've heard the 2015 mbp was the best laptop they've made, and since then have been a number of missteps. I was unfortunate enough to personally experience the awful lack of a tactile escape key on one of the newer mbp+touchbar laptops for about a year.
- deckard1 7y ago
  It doesn't take data science to understand that putting a purely visual button on a device that people do not look at while using is a tremendous blunder. A computer company forgetting how a keyboard works. Really now.
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    Yeah, in retrospect, I probably should have emphasized that I was amused by the coincidence, not that there was causation. Obviously, gathering usage statistics from hardware / software analytics wouldn't have captured the fact that there are touch typists who would be quite displeased by (a) the loss of the tactile escape key, and (b) the downward quality of the keyboards in general.
JohnFen 7y ago
> In time we'll all come to realize that privacy is merely a special case of security. I can hardly wait. I can't tell you the number of times I've been lambasted for asserting that very thing.

by apo 7y ago

zdragnar 7y ago

Overall, I agree. It's a bit amusing, though, that the original piece wasn't far off. I've heard the 2015 mbp was the best laptop they've made, and since then have been a number of missteps. I was unfortunate enough to personally experience the awful lack of a tactile escape key on one of the newer mbp+touchbar laptops for about a year.

deckard1 7y ago
It doesn't take data science to understand that putting a purely visual button on a device that people do not look at while using is a tremendous blunder. A computer company forgetting how a keyboard works. Really now.
- zdragnar 7y ago
  Yeah, in retrospect, I probably should have emphasized that I was amused by the coincidence, not that there was causation. Obviously, gathering usage statistics from hardware / software analytics wouldn't have captured the fact that there are touch typists who would be quite displeased by (a) the loss of the tactile escape key, and (b) the downward quality of the keyboards in general.

JohnFen 7y ago

> In time we'll all come to realize that privacy is merely a special case of security. I can hardly wait. I can't tell you the number of times I've been lambasted for asserting that very thing.