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Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. I for one, am happy that Apple can afford to offer

• grumdan 7y ago
  Whether it's because of their business model is an important question though, because it may tell us if we this has a good chance of being genuine and whether we can expect this to last. If it's in their financial interest to protect users' privacy, then I'm much more inclined to believe that they are actually trying to do that. If they right now appear to care about privacy, but it's for some other reason, I'd expect financial motives to eventually overrule that.
  • secfirstmd 7y ago
    Am I the only person we thinks Apple might be setting itself up to take a shot at a private, secure, ad-free, paid for social media play? I mean there are a growing number of people leaving Facebook (ok mostly for Instagram and WhatsApp) who would be willing to pay a few dollars a month to have an advert free experience in a private social media network.
    • ianai 7y ago
      I don’t see it being foretold by their actions, but you have a point. I hope they keep out of social media though. It would bring them within distance of becoming yet another bad privacy actor. I also prefer the separation of my apple account and such things.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      They have failed at every attempt at social media.
      • cameronbrown 7y ago
        Because there was never a demand for a new social network. Apple is now big enough that anything they build becomes trendy and something people will jump into.
        • scarface74 7y ago
          Apple is not that big when it comes to market share - yes they have the most affluent users - but you can’t make a social network from that.
          • adventured 7y ago
            Smartphone market share wouldn't be the defining factor in whether you could jumpstart a social network, given there are billions of active smartphones. The actual size - not relative size - of your base would define that. The only way relative would matter is if they needed to be larger than eg Android to do it, for some reason (they don't). They have ~1.4 billion active devices world-wide (900+ million active iPhones). You're acting like they have more like 50 million. They'll soon have a billion people using their various services.
            • scarface74 7y ago
              The whole idea of a social network is being able to connect with anyone not just 20% of the market.
              • cameronbrown 7y ago
                The whole idea of a social network is to connect with your friends. Young people, the most valuable demographic, overwhelmingly use iPhone in both the UK/US. Snapchat/Instagram is a successful social network just controlling this market.
        • JiNCMG 7y ago
          No. Failed because they refused to open up user info. Remember Ping and iAds. Ask the bitter people running those project what they think. To get any user's info you have to go through chains of managers and then a sign off from a board member.
    • martythemaniak 7y ago
      Yes, and they should call it Pong. Jokes aside, isn't that, functionally speaking, iMessage?
  • FighterMafia 7y ago
    Its in their financial interest because it casts a halo on the brand and incentivizes people to buy iphones.
• rapsey 7y ago
  Trying to sell something to privacy obsessed tech segment is a futile effort. They are never happy and don’t want to pay for anything anyway. But that is not their target market anyway. It is the general public and these comments are just noise.
  • propertymagnate 7y ago
    I don't think that's true, there's quite a thriving privacy based market for the tech obsessed. take librem one and purism's products, the VPN market, the pinephone, proton mail, or lavabit as examples. https://puri.sm/ https://puri.sm/ https://lavabit.com/ https://lavabit.com/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/ But yes, these comments are likely just noise.
    • rapsey 7y ago
      Thriving as in their own miniscule segment destined to remain marginal. Definitely not apple target market.
      • fwn 7y ago
        This sounds to me like moving the goalpost. First it was both: > Trying to sell something to privacy obsessed tech segment is a futile effort. They are never happy and don’t want to pay for anything anyway. But that is not their target market anyway. Now just > But that is not their target market anyway.
        • rapsey 7y ago
          I was replying to a comment about negative comments here and that they are not who apple is targeting so the negativity here is just noise. Those listed companies exist in an entirely different universe to apple and talking about them is entirely irrelevant here. Their existence proves nothing.
          • 7y ago
• baxtr 7y ago
  I don’t understand the hate. Is there an example where Apple has not delivered on their promise?
  • efaref 7y ago
    iCloud leaks?
    • joaomacp 7y ago
      This is not being talked about enough. Have people already forgot about The Fappening? It was one of the nastiest privacy failures for tech companies. I'm impressed with how fast public opinion can change.
    • atticmanatee 7y ago
      That was a hack, not them selling your info for the highest bidder.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • deleted 7y ago
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      • mqbqi 7y ago
        And also they didn't hack iCloud, they hacked the accounts of those users.
        • tty2300 7y ago
          Which most likely means someone downloaded a leaked database of another website and logged in to icloud because everyone reuses passwords.
          • donkeyd 7y ago
            It was part this, but also big part social engineering. Here's a podcast about it: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/34/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/34/?utm_source=share&utm_...
• banachtarski 7y ago
  You know when I'll believe it? When the un-screw up their app store which vastly incentivizes the development of free-to-use ad-driven apps that prey on user tracking data over premium alternatives. Ad-based revenue has a higher value proposition to developers because it dodges the inane anachronistic 30% tax. "Privacy" first is an utter illusion when the majority of apps approved in this closed ecosystem that ostensibly supports privacy does just the opposite.
  • braythwayt 7y ago
    It’s not a dichotomy, so I will just say that in addition to circumventing the app store’s take, developers have users to “blame” for the race-to-the-bottom of the surveillance capitalism bucket. As long as users will balk at paying even 4.99 for an app, developers will make them free and then engage in dark business models like surveillance and terrible in-app purchases. To be fair and stop “blaming the victims,” this is a classic hard problem in psychology: The purchase price is an immediate, objective cost. Surveillance and the possibility of getting sucked into in-app purchases are subjective, uncertain costs with consequences in the future. In aggregate, humans are really bad at making those judgments, trebly so when other humans are rigging the game to make the judgment difficult to evaluate.
    • Ntrails 7y ago
      > As long as users will balk at paying even 4.99 for an app Out of interest, what is the refund policy in the app store? I know, for example, I'm way more chilled about paying for "unknown" steam games when I can refund them after an hour of play if I don't like them.
      • WA 7y ago
        You can refund purchases for up to 14 days. I consider this a somewhat well-kept secret, because nobody seems to make use of this.
        • jannes 7y ago
• mirimir 7y ago
  Until a month or two ago, I was believing that Apple was committed to protecting its customers' privacy. Sure, it had been caving to the Chinese government. But I accepted that it had to, or stop doing business in China. And then I learned that Apple does not guarantee that apps from its online store respect users' privacy. That rather gives the lie to its commitment to privacy. I mean, it did (along with Google) take down that Facebook app that exploited the enterprise loophole to basically log all phone usage. And it has taken down apps that block ads in other apps. So why has it been more-or-less lying by omission about tracking by third-party apps? Apps that it has supposedly vetted.
  • donkeyd 7y ago
    Have you looked at the keynote? They'll now be blocking a bunch of the tracking techniques that these apps use. Yes, you're right about the past, but they're making changes to be better in the future.
    • mirimir 7y ago
      Sure. But would they have done this without the recent publicity about third-party app tracking? I suppose that they must have been working on this for some time. And maybe they deserve some slack. But there should at least be an apology for not acknowledging tracking by third-party apps. For years. While they were touting their privacy stance. And it's not just about behavioral ads. Some repressive governments have used iOS apps against dissidents.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        How do you “guarantee” third party apps don’t do tracking and allow them - with your permission - to know your location?
        • mirimir 7y ago
          I'm not arguing that it's easy. Or even possible. What I am arguing is that Apple has been BSing people. > What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone. Because that's just not true. Unless, I suppose, you don't install any third-party apps on your phone. So then, that privacy claim should look like: > What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.# > # Unless you install third-party apps. Otherwise, dissidents will feel safe using iPhones. Until they're dead or in prison.
• vectorEQ 7y ago
  they will in fact sell all aspects of your life. oh wait, you can PAY THEM so they don't. seems legit. gets them the money either way.
• tacosx 7y ago
  If I never hear the argument that "tech is just too hard and bandwidth too unaffordable, poor Zuckerberg/Bezos/Brin are so destitute they would just have to shut down the web and phones completely without behavioral advertising" it would great because it's a very very bad argument.
• chapium 7y ago
  I feel its a good market differentiator in such a crowded market. Android phones are very similar to iphones in many ways and most of them are focused on data collection.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  Yeah. All you have to do is follow the money. They're incentivized by paying customers, and maintaining privacy serves that incentive, and double-dealing would be extremely risky at best.
  • neilalexander 7y ago
    Apple's play is clever because, by breeding a generation of users who are more privacy-conscious, they're also breeding a generation of users who are more likely to buy Apple in the future in a marketplace that is otherwise hostile to privacy. It's as much a long-term game as it is a short-term one.
• neya 7y ago
  > Lots of negativity/skepticism here which is reasonable I would say given tech companies' abuse of our trust. And rightfully so. They've been accused of selling customer data in this lawsuit: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-24/apple-sued-for-selling-customers-itunes-information https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-24/apple-sue...
• tfha 7y ago
  The biggest problem that I have is that it's privacy built on a closed source platform that works extremely hard to wall users in and create substantial vendor lock-in. As someone who has tried multiple times to dip their toes into the Apple world, I can tell you that it's highly hostile to users who try to pick and choose how much they want to be an Apple citizen. If you don't agree to sign up for Apple cloud on the latest iOS, it feels like 80% of the basic functions for a smartphone get locked away from you. And they have viral aspects to their lock-in as well. Have a single family member who isn't on iMessage? Looks like they don't get to participate in your family discussions anymore. Their privacy features are a selling point today, but your privacy is 100% in their control. If the executive team made the decision tomorrow to switch Apple into a fully panopticon ecosystem, they'd be able to switch over in a year with little visibility for their users that this transition was happening. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you under heavy lock-in pressure and you are fully putting your faith in Apple that the directions they go in the future will be directions that you are happy with. That doesn't feel secure to me.
  • vinay_ys 7y ago
    On the surface, compared to Android, iOS is much more secure. It seems they ensure app sandbox is not violated by any app developer. No app can steal another apps data. You can prevent/revoke access to contacts, photos, sms, location, background execution, mobile data to any app from a central place. They allow 3rd-party apps for doing messaging (replaces iMessage), cloud storage (replaces icloud), firefox (replaces safari), 1password (replaces keychain) – all in a clean and easy way – with no ambiguity or confusion. But w.r.t end to end encryption claims, we just take them at their word. There is no formal verifiable proof. Recently we have repeatedly learnt the hard way to not trust corporations at they word. Without open-source and peer-reviewed cryptographic protocols and verifiable trusted execution models, it is not safe to believe it is truly end to end encrypted and nobody is spying.
  • maxxxxx 7y ago
    I agree. They are sitting on more and more data they will be very tempted to use if they can’t hit their growth rates in the future. It would be better if no single entity had that much data.
• Frost1x 7y ago
  Do businesses have to sell every aspect of your life to make money? Less than 10-15 years ago, they did not (not to this degree), and they survived just fine. Go back further and you'll find business made plenty of money with less and less of this practice. As a society, we're able to establish laws and protections against trends where capitalism goes awry. We banned lead usage in products like paints and set regulations to protect dumping anything and eveverything into rivers (hey its cheap). Privacy may be no different and if market forces are somehow perpetuating it to remain competitive, we as a society need to intervene in a regulatory fashion and redirect businesses to pursue other approaches to increasing revenue and implementing cost saving mechanisms.