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I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this d

I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. I can understand why the public is skeptical, but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process, the level of public harm becomes severe. Note: All opinions (in this comment and all of mine on HN) are my own.

droopyEyelids 7y ago
Show me any institution that has maintained trustworthiness for all of history, and I'll consider trusting Apple/Google/our govt. with the ability to tell where every citizen is and who they associate with for the rest of the future.
- selectodude 7y ago
  I'm just not sure why we're more trusting of our wireless service providers who have explicitly given personal location data away to not only the government, but also to advertisers, than we are of Apple who would love to sell us another $1200 phone.
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    Convenience. Convenience always wins.
- rconti 7y ago
  orrrrr don't install it at all, or delete the app when Covid-19 is no longer a threat like I plan to do.
- plerpin 7y ago
  Read the fine specification.
bjz_ 7y ago
As an Australian who has privacy concerns their government's COVIDSafe app (see https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing), and hence not installing it, I'm really thankful that Apple and Google are pushing this model of contact tracing. We still don't know if digital contact tracing is effective in practice, but it's still important to try, but we can do this in a way that avoids giving governments with worrying authoritarian tendencies another tool.
- valtism 7y ago
  COVIDSafe will be using these new APIs.
  - afro88 7y ago
    Have you got a link / source for this? Genuinely interested, not being a dick.
    - sk0g 7y ago
      From what I heard it works fine on Android, but on iOS it works ok... as long as you have the app running in the foreground, and your phone unlocked, while out and about. The only way to fix that would be to use this new API on iOS.
      - sk0g 7y ago
        Since people seem to be downvoting without commenting: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/covidsafe-issues-ios-iphone-explained/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/covidsafe-issues-ios-ipho...
        Springtime 7y ago
        I wasn't one who downvoted but parent post was asking for source on whether this app is going to utilize the new APIs, specifically. According to your subsequent link, near the bottom, currently it's unclear: "The Government will work with Google and Apple to investigate whether the new functionality announced by Google and Apple partnership is beneficial for the app performance"
yters 7y ago
Why are you so sure the data remains private? Has Apple never handed data over to the gov. for investigations criminal and otherwise? Some of the genetic companies hand data to the FBI. The reason is great and moral, tracking down serial killers and the like. But, still, regardless of how good the proximate reason, the overarching trend is not so great. And yes, I'm sure all the telecoms, hospitals, etc. also hand over our data. Adding one more, much more comprehensive data source to the pile doesn't help anything.
- azinman2 7y ago
  Because this data doesn't exist on Apple servers, and what does exist are a bunch of randomly generated identifiers. Have you read the proposal at all [1]? [1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    It's not clear from these specifications on how the rolling IDs are associated with a single user after a diagnosis is made, and whether those keys are interlinked. While this explains the phone-to-phone model it does not explain the other half of the system from what I can tell.
    - hyperturtle 7y ago
      I think by design they're not meant to be associated with a single user. A hospital would publish all id's of users that have found positive with covid and each other individual user's themselves will see if they have been in contact recently with one since they have saved all id's they've seen recently
      - yters 7y ago
        Could network analysis be used to deanonymize these rolling ids? I remember reading that network analysis easily deanonymizes blockchains. Seems same would apply to rolling ids.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
I know people at Facebook who say the same thing, but at the end of the day, both companies only pay lip service to privacy in the way their products and services actually operate.
- ngngngng 7y ago
  If we paint privacy as simply black or white, sure. But if there exist shades of grey in privacy than Apple and Facebook are on vastly different sides of the spectrum.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    One hands all your data over to the Chinese government if you are Chinese. The other gives your data to Cambridge Analytica. I wouldn't say they're vastly different.
herdodoodo 7y ago
In your example, institutions built up trust and it was broken by some third party. Public health was compromised as a result. In the case of privacy, the trust was broken by the institutions themselves (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, US gov obviously as well). Public privacy was eroded as a result.
- Teever 7y ago
  Yeah it's really self righteous of an Apple employee compare their employer to the entire international multi decade effort to develop and distribute life saving and civilization changing vaccines.
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tathougies 7y ago
> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. Good. That took almost 10 millenia of human development to achieve. Let's not regress.
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choppaface 7y ago
The anti-vax movement challenges science itself; the anti-Google/Apple movement challenges corporate-level ethics and human control over identity. You can independently reproduce experiments demonstrating the efficacy of medicine. You can’t reproduce the faith that you place in your own corporation.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  While that might be an argument in general, the protocol Google and apple are working in is cryptographically secure. They provably can't back out data about you.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    Is their code open source? How do you know this?
    - viraptor 7y ago
      Realistically, those APIs will be analysed soon after they're available in the same way COVIDSafe was. If they do something different than what's in the design, we'll know pretty quickly.
    - bhupy 7y ago
      Yes. https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/ https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/
      - sneak 7y ago
        There is no code available at that link, and no indication whatsoever that Google and Apple’s implementation of the algorithms and protocols described in those documents will be open source. I believe your claim is false.
      - probably_wrong 7y ago
        A PDF document with a specification is not even close to "open source code". There is no way to know whether the specification actually matches the implementation.
Teever 7y ago
> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. You frame that like society itself or the people that make up society are somehow at fault. Perhaps the issue is that elements of society like Apple have taken actions or have failed to take actions which would have engendered the sort of reaction that you would prefer to see. If Apple wants my trust they need to earn it. Why should I give Apple my trust again after being burned by them repeatedly? Does Apple even trust me?
joe3774 7y ago
is the private data PRISM safe?
- azinman2 7y ago
  All your data stays on your device. You only upload your random identifier if you test positive, as confirmed by a trusted health provider. I would worry much more about them if I were you. Personally I'm far more concerned about dying from COVID-19 than the government who already knows much about me abuses my health status of this virus.
- eyelidlessness 7y ago
  No data is. You can't judge the security or privacy of a design based on people selling it out in secret.
dntbnmpls 7y ago
> I can understand why the public is skeptical You can understand the skepticism and yet equate the skeptical people to "anti-vax" movement? That's very sneaky of you.
- cambalache 7y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair.
- xvector 7y ago
  Both movements disregard evidence and reality to fit their feelings.
  - sgift 7y ago
    Please show the scientific consensus that corporations are good, have almost no side effects and we should trust them.
    - xvector 7y ago
      Please show me where I made such a blanket, absolute statement.
  - ric2b 7y ago
    What evidence is being disregarded here?
deathgrips 7y ago
Comparing privacy advocates to anti-vaxxers is a bad-faith tactic that steers the conversation away from the technology.
fenomas 7y ago
I've long felt like Apple is uniquely easy to distrust, due to its almost total lack of visible employees. I assume there are actual people working there, but I've never seen one, say, speak (openly) at a meetup or answer a stackoverflow question, or the like. ~Everything I know about Apple either comes from an advertisement or from a guy who talked to a guy who talked to Gruber, and I have a feeling that that makes it easier for people to assume nefarious behavior behind the scenes. Actually, with the exception of people working on standards committees, I think your comment may be the first time I've ever seen an Apple employee openly comment in a public forum.
- OpieCunningham 7y ago
  The general populace generally doesn’t pay any attention to any statements from any employees of any company. Those in the tech industry generally don’t pay any attention to statements from any employees of any company outside the tech industry. Being aware of statements from employees does not appear to be a factor in terms of trust in a company.
  - fenomas 7y ago
    I read GP's post (and hence my reply) as being about sentiment here on HN. Obviously I agree that the general public's opinion of Apple isn't heavily influenced by meetup speeches and Gruber's blog :P
- brian-armstrong 7y ago
  Yep, I think this is quite right. In fact my first thought after seeing this guy self-identify was "welp, that guy's getting fired"
  - fluffything 7y ago
    Yep, same thoughts. Most of the open-source contributors in my projects that get hit by a bus, get hit by an Apple's bus (they start working at Apple, and cannot say anything publicly anymore or contribute to any project).
- 7y ago
harry8 7y ago
Apple regularly thieve from their customers. Apps you own, move country. Apple just take them with no refund. ONE example. Great you work "hard" but why the hell would anyone trust apple when Apple have repeatedly shown they are totally untrustworthy. Beyond which, securing data, that's just keeping from competitors. Where is Apple's policy that they will not now, nor will they ever abuse customer's data without explicit consent for each and every use with some very real consequence for not doing it. "You don't need that, we're acting in your interests, trust us." The only sane response is to say "no" and point out apple are dishonest. You work for a dishonest company and can't see it because your paycheck depends on not seeing it. That is something /I/ find very, very frustrating. Apple give the same commitments that Google and Facebook do and are judged accordingly.
eternalban 7y ago
> I can understand why the public is skeptical Please spell it out, because the rest of your post doesn't reflect such an understanding. In fact, the content of your plaintive here uses all the usual tropes that are forced down our throats in corporate media. Btw, this is also my "opinion". Care to hear more? So I hadn't really looked into the anti-vax stuff until the universally announced "future society" plans to "combat" this disease -- so carefully conceived it would elicit expression of admiration for its comprehensive scope, breathtaking scale, and unapologetic ambition from an un-interested I, but alas I and every other I is an interested party here. One "celebrity" that I read up on making "anti-vax" noises -- son of another "celebrity" and with a celebrity uncle to boot (and they paid dearly for their 'lust for fame', as you may know) -- pointed out a few 'interesting' things about vaccines. For example, I had no idea that vaccine makers are shielded from liability. And that also prevents any sort of "discovery" to find evidence of wrong doing by these companies. And it turns out these companies have records of misdeeds. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ So as to my claim that your "understanding" is lacking: > working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private "Apple": First, even though I am a fanboy of your employer's products, I have zero interest in a 'governance model' that requires the good graces and promises of a corporation, or a grouping of corporations. (Don't even get me started on Alphabets.) Secondly, push comes to shove, I much rather entrust my civil and human rights to an entity to which, at least on paper, I have some degree of input. I refer to the government of the United States here. (I think my constitutional rights trump a EULA, agreed?) And since you are re-assuring us here -- are you not? -- can you care to reassure us of the following: - Our systems do not depend on the good will and intent of its operators. Nor will future changes in Apple executive team and/or board of directors have any possibility of subverting our work. "data", and "private": We're no longer talking about pics of dirty bits being shared over networks. You work at Apple so you probably are smarter than me, so it's a bit embarrasing to have to point this out to a superior mind, but here it goes: You and others are building the infrastructure of complete oversight and monitoring of people on this planet. This is fairly weighty matter, agreed? Do we get a chance to have some input on this, or possibly say "No chance in hell that we'll have coroprations operating STASI International 2.0"? What's your "opinion" regarding that? In fact, did anyone make a convincing case that we "must" take maximalist measures to "combat" this not quite the plague? [minor cleanups]
tjoff 7y ago
I don't doubt that the people doing this are competent, doing their best and are aiming for a privacy preserving solution. But that is irrelevant. 1. Neither Google nor Apple deserve the trust this requires. Seriously! 2. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are arguably pushing tons of resources which will directly harm all current and future human societies. It is not what this precedent will do for us during this epidemic, but afterwards. Also, normalizing tracking is not self fulfilling for Google and Apple, not at all... Thanks for all you hard work?
swiley 7y ago
If you want to restore trust then stop fighting with users and give them control over their devices. iOS is full of dark patterns and a few absolutely awful restrictions that are very anti user. It shouldn’t be surprising that the users don’t trust Apple. (Hopefully this doesn’t come across as disrespectful, I think the work you guys have done on contact tracing is awesome.)
jb775 7y ago
Distrust and caution are the parents of security. - Benjamin Franklin
fossuser 7y ago
Yeah, there’s so little critical thinking going on in general. I wish people really tried to understand rather than just give knee-jerk negative responses to go along with their existing world view. A lot of people are trying to do the right thing and working hard to do good. The cynical HN default response just feels like a lazy way to try and signal intelligence.
- rapsey 7y ago
  Edward snowden, gag laws and the history of FBI/CIA is what any educated critical thinking person needs to understand why these apps should not be trusted. Apple and Google may have good intentions. But if there is one thing clear from history is that if anything can be abused it will be. Maybe not now but it certainly will eventually.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    Sure - and there are nuanced/interesting discussions that can happen about the risks, but that’s not what most of this commentary is. Most of the comments are empty of any actual content from people who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on. The protocol is designed by people aware and concerned about these risks (which is why the way it works is pretty interesting). A lot of interesting work happens in the challenging areas where it’s critical to get things right, there are real risks, and the answers aren’t obvious. Engaging in those areas where things are complex is important. It's easy to just remove yourself from the problem, say something can't be trusted, and then feel good about your moral purity, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. It does, and there is real value in putting work in to solve it. If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it exactly because you're concerned about the risks. Jeff Hammerbacher's quote from working at Facebook reminds me of this, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” I think he's right, and working on these bigger non-ad software problems is where the effort should be, because they are hard, and because the outcome is important. The governments of the west need to be capable, but still protect the privacy of their people - that isn't an easy problem.
mcantelon 7y ago
Institutions earned their current distrust.
adatavizguy 7y ago
We are culturally obsessed with "Luke, trust your feelings." There is something extremely wrong and dangerous with Star Wars and that idea to put away reason and just trust our feelings. Joseph Campbell what did you do?
- cl3m 7y ago
  Maybe not everything can be explained with reason, the unconscious mind can play its part.
arcticbull 7y ago
As a former Apple employee, it's gutsy for you to post this, or anything, certainly on a controversial topic. You don't work for the kind of employer that values someone sticking their head out and saying ... anything. They want to control the message, and saying anything may be worse for both you, and for Apple, than saying nothing. Just be careful. Apple's got the people to manage this PR situation.
- juuul 7y ago
  As someone else commented, this is one of the reasons why trusting companies like Apple is a bad idea. Even if employees had real concerns about a technology, or wanted to discuss the pros/cons, we would never hear about it. It should be obvious why a strong focus on secrecy and "controlling the message" breeds distrust.
  - shuckles 7y ago
    The appropriate venue to discuss concerns with technology in a forum that will actually impact it is rarely a public message board.
- rapnie 7y ago
  That does not imbibe more trust in me regarding the corporate world, Apple this time. Big corporates have done many things to erode it, just like governments did. As we all know, trust leaves on horseback, comes back on foot. And in current 'distrust-first' society with populism feeding the gut, it may not come back at all for quite some time.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  > it's gutsy for you to post this, That comment seems completely neutral. Not being able to post that comment without worrying about consequences sounds absolutely dystopian.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    It's Apple, that's how it works. You've frequently got no idea what the person down the hallway is working on.
PeterStuer 7y ago
I find it disingenuous that u use antivax in your argument. First of all the tech industry has been thriving on selling out and exploiting personal data for decades, and this 'business model' has become in practice unavoidable on the online world. And while big pharma has many deep flaws, making people deliberately ill through vaxination programs isn't it. Secondly, everyone that understands low powered radio wave signals and keeps abrest of covid-19 infection vectors can plainly see that any correlation between those two are going to be extremely weak at best, and extremely easy to game. No vaxine with such poor results would be allowed on the market, let alone prescribed. This is a bad case of tech utopist solutioning gone awry.
Legogris 7y ago
Release the source code and provide some mechanism for users to have verifiable proof that the published code matches the application running on the device and we can start talking about trust. Given past track record of both companies, this is the only way I would ever have of not being skeptical.
- nindalf 7y ago
  Do you have some evidence that Apple and Google run backdoors to privacy on iOS or Android devices? You speak about the track record of both companies, surely you should be able to point out several examples of this. The spec seems pretty clear - it's not possible. If you feel that you don't trust them to implement the spec correctly due to incompetence or malice on their part - you need to supply the proof. If we're relying on your gut feel to be skeptical, you just look like an anti-vaxxer saying "I don't trust Big Pharma's vaccines based on my gut feel."
  - Legogris 7y ago
    There's arguably a lot more evidence against Google than Apple here. But Apple did lie about their involvement, or even knowledge of, the PRISM program. Snowden leaks. I highly recommend Glenn Grennwald's book No Place to Hide if you're not interested in digging though sources yourself. Even against their will, companies with capabilities can and have been compelled by government agencies to go against their promises and lie about it. Additionally, with organizations of this size, it's very plausible that the vast majority of employees and even executives are blissfully unaware of wrongdoings, abuse and involvement in conspiracy by individual employees or decision makers. All it takes is a single compromised or malicious person to add new capabilities in an update to an already rolled-out and well-intentioned software. Possibly a handful if you add strongly enforced and audited mechanisms for co-signing releases and whatnot.
    - nindalf 7y ago
      I've read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. It doesn't get more detailed than that. There is nothing in the book that indicates that Google's implementation of the contact tracing spec would deviate from the spec either through incompetence or malice. You're making vague, unsubstantiated claims about how this could be compromised. Even if there is a bug that allows such apps to collect location info, that has nothing to do with Snowden leaks. If a government is keen on collecting such information, they would simply not use Google/Apple's APIs and instead roll their own using bluetooth and location services. This was pointed out in the article. Now could you explain to us why you're promoting a conspiracy theory that the government will lean on Apple and Google to introduce malicious bugs into their APIs when they don't need the APIs at all?
matheusmoreira 7y ago
How's anti-vaccination in any way comparable to lack of trust in corporations? We have decades of evidence showing the efficacy of vaccines. Ask any old pediatrician what hospitals were like before vaccines. Can Apple and Google produce equally strong evidence that their new surveillance system will reduce mortality and be resistant to abuse?
- a1369209993 7y ago
  More to the point, we have decades of evidence showing the efficacy of vaccines, and we have decades of evidence showing that corporations cannot be trusted with anything and that it's always a matter of when, not if, they back on any promise they've made.
verve_rat 7y ago
Apple is not an "institution". A arm of government or a long standing NGO are institutions. Apple is a business, it shouldn't get institutional trust.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > A arm of government or a long standing NGO are institutions The New York Times is neither of those, yet many people would characterize it, alongside the Fourth Estate, as institutions. The term "institution" codes depth beyond legal form [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution
killjoywashere 7y ago
As a lifelong public servant, welcome to the ungrateful side of life. If you're providing a service to the public with the hopes of their gratitude, you will be sad. Do it for the same reason you change your baby's diaper: you love them and it needs doing. They might take pleasure in pissing on you while you're doing it, but this thing you love will be better off afterward.
- the_gipsy 7y ago
  Let's not compare apple to a public institution. What apple does is in the interest of the shareholders and nothing else.
  - spdustin 7y ago
    Perhaps the institutional shareholders have Apple holdings precisely because their privacy-centric practices increase their stability, independence, and profit—without having to sell out their customers.
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - sumedh 7y ago
      No, they hold it just to get a return on their investment.
  - mrlala 7y ago
    >What apple does is in the interest of the shareholders and nothing else Honestly what is with this attitude? Yeah, I get it.. you took a business class and learned that everything a company does should be to maximize shareholder value. But welcome to the real world. Sure the company wants to make money, but they also want to provide a valuable service. Yeah sometimes making money gets in the way with the best product they could offer. But it's people making the decisions of what to make. It's people who use the software (let's say osx/ios) that want to make it better. It's developers who sit there are think how can they improve this feature so it's great for people.
toper-centage 7y ago
Unfortunately, these companies earned our distrust and cynicism. I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I can't bring myself to believe that Google and - to a lesser extent - Apple are not going to record this data. I also don't believe that American companies have the liberty to disobey the US government and their letter agencies if they request this data to be recorded for them to abuse later. And for that reason, I will be disabling any tracking on my phone.
stilisstuk 7y ago
Pertaining to 'institutional trust'. One ought to be able to trust e.g. government. Alas you can not (I am a public servant). One should never unequivocally trust for-profit companies. Also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszcms https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszcms
- zajio1am 7y ago
  Making such big difference between government and (big) companies seems naive. One should never trust neither government nor companies. They are not that different, both are power structures with vastly more power and different concerns and priorities than an individual. There are many parallels between them. Companies run on economic power, government run on political (and also economic and hard) power. Companies are kept at bay by market forces, government by democratic process. Both of them may work or fail (monopolies in market, different kinds of identity politics in democratic process). Both companies and government can do extraordinary good (when incentives are well aligned and leaders are competent) and extraordinary bad (when either is not true). Both can empower petty tyrants inside their hierarchies. The reasonable way is to keep both dependent on each other and to limit each to their own domain.
m12k 7y ago
I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy - I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. Basically, I can trust specific people if I feel that I know their character, and by proxy I might trust a company that these people have significant control over. Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic levels, and even founders' altruistic motivations tend to fade or get drowned out by the basic profit motives of an increasingly large group of shareholders. At that point, it's not a matter of trusting, it's at best a matter of recognizing if the strategic goals of the company aligns with my interests in specific ways. For example Apple has made a strategic choice to double down on privacy, because invading privacy is not core to their business the way it is to Google and Facebook, so this allows them to gain an edge over their rivals. Great, that's something. That doesn't mean I "trust" Apple the way I would a person - it's more akin to how I'd recognize when a wild animal doesn't view humans as prey, so I'm willing to get relatively close to them without protective equipment. I don't trust them in general, I don't expect them to care about me at all, but I trust them to follow their instinct, which is to not attack me unprovoked.
- devin 7y ago
  What??? I cannot make any sense out of your comment. No disrespect, but you're jumping around a lot and I do not follow. ETA: Allow me to explain for the downvoters: The size of the company is irrelevant. There are plenty of large companies that have honest leadership. I can trust a fraction of the size of the company, because I trust those people to not work for horrible companies. Trusting a human being and trusting an organized group of them are obviously different. Your personal alignment with a company's goals has nothing to do with whether said company is trustworthy. You can trust a company to meet its goals without becoming best friends with it. The goals here are quite clear. The spec has been published. Apple and Google are well poised to meet the goal at hand. Truly, who else is going to do this right now with the same level of resources, and how long are you willing to wait for it? Finally, I found the analogy of wild, dangerous animals to companies extremely weird in light of the fact that you started your comment with "I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing".
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neiman 7y ago
> feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust The main mistake is that you compare, emotionally at least, Apple to an institute. But it's not, it's a commercial company. "We" never had or should have had any trust in commercial companies - maybe besides small ones as someone else noted here. The problem is that as a society we allowed a few commercial companies to become such an inherent part of our lives.
- devin 7y ago
  The size of the company doesn’t matter. Small companies are not inherently less evil. You can have a company with no VC backing or shareholders and screw over your customers at every turn. The idea that the size of the organization is directly related to whether or not it is worth trusting is ridiculous. Just because I don’t know everyone at a hospital doesn’t mean they aren’t worth trusting.
  - neiman 7y ago
    I was referring to this comment, I agree with what's written there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077187
boudin 7y ago
Apple doesn't make it easy to be liked overall. For example, trying to get 30% of a company revenue to publish an app on ios store and push the arrogance all the way to ask a company to change its business model is insane. I'm not gonna go all the way to ask to be able to build or test things in containers, but at least do it easily in virtual machines legally without having to buy or rent some apple hardware for no good reason. Why not even being able to build ios apps outside of macos? There's no technical reason not to be able to do so neither. For me, the discrepancy between apple marketing around the products and how it feels being stuck in the past as soon as having to build and support anything related to apple makes the whole company not likeable and not trustworthy.
flukus 7y ago
> but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge Why do you assume we ever had that trust? Corporations and Government have never had personal data on such a scale before and we've never had such little control over this data. Especially with google, your expecting us to trust a spyware company. > The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process Anti-vaxers have been around as long as vaccinations have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#History I'd say this trust has never existed, there was just an illusion that it was because we couldn't see into others bubbles so easily.
rorykoehler 7y ago
Companies shouldn't be allow to become as rich and powerful as Apple. We're supposed to live in a democratic system. Corporate power on the scale of FAANG is the antithesis of democracy.
- have_faith 7y ago
  Thought experiment: People willingly giving this power over to an alternative group of people (a company in this case) could be considered a democratic vote from a populace? Providing power is willingly given to them by the actions of the group.
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    At best people are voting for who has the best product or service to solve their immediate needs. I don't buy Apple products (and I'm fully in the Apple ecosystem) because of Apple's great vision for how society should develop. Democracy operates on a different plane.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  So a democratic system that ignores property rights when it suits the mob that is not actually Democratic.
  - andrekandre 7y ago
    property rights of companies or individuals? democracy is about individual freedoms and rights, not necessarily those of profit-seeking entities
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      And are not individual workers "profit-seeking entities" btw I do own Apple shares so what about my rights not to have those expropriated.
    - zajio1am 7y ago
      Corporations are just legal conctructs to easily define rights and powers of their owners. So property rights of companies are just property rights of their owners.
toofy 7y ago
> ...but I feel like as a society we’ve swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. I understand and completely empathize with your concern. I do think this lack of trust is and is going to cause very serious problems. However, this mistrust has been earned. The incentives of large companies seem to be odds with what many people consider good for themselves or their communities. We like to tell ourselves that a company’s goals must align with a community’s concerns or another company will come along and replace them. But this doesn’t seem to happen in reality and if it does, it can take decades which by that time, the damage is already done. Particularly if the company is above a certain size or retain a certain percent of their market. At scale companies can and regularly do act almost antagonistic towards their customers and the communities in which they live. During some college research I found an older article from years ago and while I’ve looked repeatedly, I haven’t been able to find it again (If anyone knows it, please please let me know.) I’m running off of memory here so forgive me for the weak description. The author had researched and discovered how most very large companies used to require that every move they made would place a very high value on how it would impact their local community first and then place a high value on how the decision would impact their wider customer’s communities. These considerations played a massive role in whether or not they would move forward with the idea. If I’m remembering correctly this was written into these massive companies bylaws. Their first concern wasn’t regarding profit, it was about community impacts, and then profit came later in the decision. I think we’ve gotten too far away from this and it’s going to cause even more damage than we’ve already seen. We’re so far away from this ideal and now an awful lot of companies will first decide if they can get away with something and if it will cause quarterly growth, then it’s worth moving forward on with little thought into wider impacts. This change has led to little if any thought going into the community wide second and third order effects. The fallout means we’re now dealing with a drastic diminishing trust in companies. I share your concerns because I don’t think large organizations are inherently untrustworthy, and I know many (if not most) people inside these organizations have higher ideals and many companies have the best of intentions, but I think their hands are tied by systemic problems and these problems are eroding at fundamental societal trust systems.
a_imho 7y ago
Equating anti vaxxers with corporate skeptics is a surefire way to build trust /s
AJRF 7y ago
Institutional trust has been eroding since Watergate and almost non-existent since Snowden leaks. Seeing Apples name on the PRISM slide was a gut bunch, you dont and will never get blind trust anymore. Saying this is similar to the anti-vax movement is so frustrating for me to read when special closed courts are set up in my country to deliver verdicts on the legality of data acquisition and they STILL found the GCHQ overeached and illegally spied on citizens. The UK gov has even decided to not use the API provided by Apple here so if I could trust Apple (which I don't) its being undermined by the fact the government decided to take Palantir on to help make it and it looks like they are getting involved in the US effort too.
- dastx 7y ago
  Yeah but it is still Palantir, so maybe don't trust the government's judgement that much.
throwawaylolx 7y ago
Amazing. A pretentious, emotionally-manipulative version of "if you don't trust closed-sourced public corporate #43214 you're basically an anti-vaxxer!" is the most upvoted comment in this HN thread. Hilarious
choward 7y ago
> I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. As a person reading comments it's frustrating that an Apple employee thinks their company is special and should be trusted. It doesn't matter what you say, at the end of the day your goal is the same as any other company: profit. There's a zero percent chance I will install any of your garbage on my phone on purpose.
- HatchedLake721 7y ago
  Disgusting comment. A person is genuinely invested and passionate about privacy (and we know Apple’s stance on privacy, from Steve Jobs, to their stance with FBI, privacy tsars, keeping data on the phone, Secure Enclave, etc) and you call their work garbage.
  - choward 7y ago
    > A person is genuinely invested and passionate about privacy...and you call their work garbage. I'm referring to the output of Google and Apple as garbage. You're the one trying to make this personal. I don't really care that an individual cares about privacy. It has nothing to do with the machine they are a part of. > and we know Apple’s stance on privacy No we don't. We don't "know" anything. Are you serious?
- dordoka 7y ago
  To be able to install anything that uses the new contact tracing stuff, you must own a phone that is based either on iOS or Android. I'm honestly curious: if you are using any of those already, is that not even worse than this "garbage" you talk about?
  - choward 7y ago
    I actually posted my comment from my Android phone. And yes, it is garbage.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, The anti-vaxxers may be wrong, but boiling it down to a "celebrity's feels" seriously underestimates the movement, and likely adds to the reasons these people don't trust the institutions.
pjc50 7y ago
> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process, the level of public harm becomes severe This is not an accident. A great deal of work has gone into destroying public trust and the capacity of institutions to make impartial decisions based on data. Partly from the profit motive, partly for destructive political purposes. And a lot of people in the tech industry and on here actively support the right to destroy that work by posting the most thoroughly debunked and dangerous lies on popular tech platforms - again for their own ideological purposes.
monkeynotes 7y ago
Give me an example from history where everyday 'papers please' has worked out well. There are many reasons to challenge broad authoritarian policy. Don't pollute the dialog with anti-vaxers, that shuts down a completely legitimate conversation that should happen in a healthy society. Accepting wide-spread social tracking unchallenged is worrisome. I should not have to explain to intelligent minds why. The paths you open up when you allow something like social compliance tracking and scoring are just terrifying. Way more terrifying for our children than the immediate health problems.
AlexandrB 7y ago
I think I trust Apple more than any other FAANG company, but that's like saying you're the cleanest hog in the pen. Even if it's true, it doesn't necessarily mean much and you're still tarred by association. The tech industry has burned through trust at a blistering pace in the last decade and it's hard not to be cynical.
wltprgm 7y ago
I do think that open sourcing and transparency matter a lot in this era. Do that first before claiming the hard work, if not what's the difference between a mad scientist and a doctor?

droopyEyelids 7y ago

Show me any institution that has maintained trustworthiness for all of history, and I'll consider trusting Apple/Google/our govt. with the ability to tell where every citizen is and who they associate with for the rest of the future.

selectodude 7y ago
I'm just not sure why we're more trusting of our wireless service providers who have explicitly given personal location data away to not only the government, but also to advertisers, than we are of Apple who would love to sell us another $1200 phone.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Convenience. Convenience always wins.
rconti 7y ago
orrrrr don't install it at all, or delete the app when Covid-19 is no longer a threat like I plan to do.
plerpin 7y ago
Read the fine specification.

bjz_ 7y ago

As an Australian who has privacy concerns their government's COVIDSafe app (see https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing https://github.com/vteague/contactTracing), and hence not installing it, I'm really thankful that Apple and Google are pushing this model of contact tracing. We still don't know if digital contact tracing is effective in practice, but it's still important to try, but we can do this in a way that avoids giving governments with worrying authoritarian tendencies another tool.

valtism 7y ago
COVIDSafe will be using these new APIs.
- afro88 7y ago
  Have you got a link / source for this? Genuinely interested, not being a dick.
  - sk0g 7y ago
    From what I heard it works fine on Android, but on iOS it works ok... as long as you have the app running in the foreground, and your phone unlocked, while out and about. The only way to fix that would be to use this new API on iOS.
    - sk0g 7y ago
      Since people seem to be downvoting without commenting: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/covidsafe-issues-ios-iphone-explained/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/covidsafe-issues-ios-ipho...
      - Springtime 7y ago
        I wasn't one who downvoted but parent post was asking for source on whether this app is going to utilize the new APIs, specifically. According to your subsequent link, near the bottom, currently it's unclear: "The Government will work with Google and Apple to investigate whether the new functionality announced by Google and Apple partnership is beneficial for the app performance"

yters 7y ago

Why are you so sure the data remains private? Has Apple never handed data over to the gov. for investigations criminal and otherwise? Some of the genetic companies hand data to the FBI. The reason is great and moral, tracking down serial killers and the like. But, still, regardless of how good the proximate reason, the overarching trend is not so great. And yes, I'm sure all the telecoms, hospitals, etc. also hand over our data. Adding one more, much more comprehensive data source to the pile doesn't help anything.

azinman2 7y ago
Because this data doesn't exist on Apple servers, and what does exist are a bunch of randomly generated identifiers. Have you read the proposal at all [1]? [1] https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  It's not clear from these specifications on how the rolling IDs are associated with a single user after a diagnosis is made, and whether those keys are interlinked. While this explains the phone-to-phone model it does not explain the other half of the system from what I can tell.
  - hyperturtle 7y ago
    I think by design they're not meant to be associated with a single user. A hospital would publish all id's of users that have found positive with covid and each other individual user's themselves will see if they have been in contact recently with one since they have saved all id's they've seen recently
    - yters 7y ago
      Could network analysis be used to deanonymize these rolling ids? I remember reading that network analysis easily deanonymizes blockchains. Seems same would apply to rolling ids.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

I know people at Facebook who say the same thing, but at the end of the day, both companies only pay lip service to privacy in the way their products and services actually operate.

ngngngng 7y ago
If we paint privacy as simply black or white, sure. But if there exist shades of grey in privacy than Apple and Facebook are on vastly different sides of the spectrum.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  One hands all your data over to the Chinese government if you are Chinese. The other gives your data to Cambridge Analytica. I wouldn't say they're vastly different.

herdodoodo 7y ago

In your example, institutions built up trust and it was broken by some third party. Public health was compromised as a result. In the case of privacy, the trust was broken by the institutions themselves (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, US gov obviously as well). Public privacy was eroded as a result.

Teever 7y ago
Yeah it's really self righteous of an Apple employee compare their employer to the entire international multi decade effort to develop and distribute life saving and civilization changing vaccines.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tathougies 7y ago

> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. Good. That took almost 10 millenia of human development to achieve. Let's not regress.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

choppaface 7y ago

The anti-vax movement challenges science itself; the anti-Google/Apple movement challenges corporate-level ethics and human control over identity. You can independently reproduce experiments demonstrating the efficacy of medicine. You can’t reproduce the faith that you place in your own corporation.

joshuamorton 7y ago
While that might be an argument in general, the protocol Google and apple are working in is cryptographically secure. They provably can't back out data about you.
- colordrops 7y ago
  Is their code open source? How do you know this?
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Realistically, those APIs will be analysed soon after they're available in the same way COVIDSafe was. If they do something different than what's in the design, we'll know pretty quickly.
  - bhupy 7y ago
    Yes. https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/ https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing/
    - sneak 7y ago
      There is no code available at that link, and no indication whatsoever that Google and Apple’s implementation of the algorithms and protocols described in those documents will be open source. I believe your claim is false.
    - probably_wrong 7y ago
      A PDF document with a specification is not even close to "open source code". There is no way to know whether the specification actually matches the implementation.

Teever 7y ago

> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. You frame that like society itself or the people that make up society are somehow at fault. Perhaps the issue is that elements of society like Apple have taken actions or have failed to take actions which would have engendered the sort of reaction that you would prefer to see. If Apple wants my trust they need to earn it. Why should I give Apple my trust again after being burned by them repeatedly? Does Apple even trust me?

joe3774 7y ago

is the private data PRISM safe?

azinman2 7y ago
All your data stays on your device. You only upload your random identifier if you test positive, as confirmed by a trusted health provider. I would worry much more about them if I were you. Personally I'm far more concerned about dying from COVID-19 than the government who already knows much about me abuses my health status of this virus.
eyelidlessness 7y ago
No data is. You can't judge the security or privacy of a design based on people selling it out in secret.

dntbnmpls 7y ago

> I can understand why the public is skeptical You can understand the skepticism and yet equate the skeptical people to "anti-vax" movement? That's very sneaky of you.

cambalache 7y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair.
xvector 7y ago
Both movements disregard evidence and reality to fit their feelings.
- sgift 7y ago
  Please show the scientific consensus that corporations are good, have almost no side effects and we should trust them.
  - xvector 7y ago
    Please show me where I made such a blanket, absolute statement.
- ric2b 7y ago
  What evidence is being disregarded here?

deathgrips 7y ago

Comparing privacy advocates to anti-vaxxers is a bad-faith tactic that steers the conversation away from the technology.

fenomas 7y ago

I've long felt like Apple is uniquely easy to distrust, due to its almost total lack of visible employees. I assume there are actual people working there, but I've never seen one, say, speak (openly) at a meetup or answer a stackoverflow question, or the like. ~Everything I know about Apple either comes from an advertisement or from a guy who talked to a guy who talked to Gruber, and I have a feeling that that makes it easier for people to assume nefarious behavior behind the scenes. Actually, with the exception of people working on standards committees, I think your comment may be the first time I've ever seen an Apple employee openly comment in a public forum.

OpieCunningham 7y ago
The general populace generally doesn’t pay any attention to any statements from any employees of any company. Those in the tech industry generally don’t pay any attention to statements from any employees of any company outside the tech industry. Being aware of statements from employees does not appear to be a factor in terms of trust in a company.
- fenomas 7y ago
  I read GP's post (and hence my reply) as being about sentiment here on HN. Obviously I agree that the general public's opinion of Apple isn't heavily influenced by meetup speeches and Gruber's blog :P
brian-armstrong 7y ago
Yep, I think this is quite right. In fact my first thought after seeing this guy self-identify was "welp, that guy's getting fired"
- fluffything 7y ago
  Yep, same thoughts. Most of the open-source contributors in my projects that get hit by a bus, get hit by an Apple's bus (they start working at Apple, and cannot say anything publicly anymore or contribute to any project).
7y ago

harry8 7y ago

Apple regularly thieve from their customers. Apps you own, move country. Apple just take them with no refund. ONE example. Great you work "hard" but why the hell would anyone trust apple when Apple have repeatedly shown they are totally untrustworthy. Beyond which, securing data, that's just keeping from competitors. Where is Apple's policy that they will not now, nor will they ever abuse customer's data without explicit consent for each and every use with some very real consequence for not doing it. "You don't need that, we're acting in your interests, trust us." The only sane response is to say "no" and point out apple are dishonest. You work for a dishonest company and can't see it because your paycheck depends on not seeing it. That is something /I/ find very, very frustrating. Apple give the same commitments that Google and Facebook do and are judged accordingly.

eternalban 7y ago

> I can understand why the public is skeptical Please spell it out, because the rest of your post doesn't reflect such an understanding. In fact, the content of your plaintive here uses all the usual tropes that are forced down our throats in corporate media. Btw, this is also my "opinion". Care to hear more? So I hadn't really looked into the anti-vax stuff until the universally announced "future society" plans to "combat" this disease -- so carefully conceived it would elicit expression of admiration for its comprehensive scope, breathtaking scale, and unapologetic ambition from an un-interested I, but alas I and every other I is an interested party here. One "celebrity" that I read up on making "anti-vax" noises -- son of another "celebrity" and with a celebrity uncle to boot (and they paid dearly for their 'lust for fame', as you may know) -- pointed out a few 'interesting' things about vaccines. For example, I had no idea that vaccine makers are shielded from liability. And that also prevents any sort of "discovery" to find evidence of wrong doing by these companies. And it turns out these companies have records of misdeeds. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ So as to my claim that your "understanding" is lacking: > working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private "Apple": First, even though I am a fanboy of your employer's products, I have zero interest in a 'governance model' that requires the good graces and promises of a corporation, or a grouping of corporations. (Don't even get me started on Alphabets.) Secondly, push comes to shove, I much rather entrust my civil and human rights to an entity to which, at least on paper, I have some degree of input. I refer to the government of the United States here. (I think my constitutional rights trump a EULA, agreed?) And since you are re-assuring us here -- are you not? -- can you care to reassure us of the following: - Our systems do not depend on the good will and intent of its operators. Nor will future changes in Apple executive team and/or board of directors have any possibility of subverting our work. "data", and "private": We're no longer talking about pics of dirty bits being shared over networks. You work at Apple so you probably are smarter than me, so it's a bit embarrasing to have to point this out to a superior mind, but here it goes: You and others are building the infrastructure of complete oversight and monitoring of people on this planet. This is fairly weighty matter, agreed? Do we get a chance to have some input on this, or possibly say "No chance in hell that we'll have coroprations operating STASI International 2.0"? What's your "opinion" regarding that? In fact, did anyone make a convincing case that we "must" take maximalist measures to "combat" this not quite the plague? [minor cleanups]

tjoff 7y ago

I don't doubt that the people doing this are competent, doing their best and are aiming for a privacy preserving solution. But that is irrelevant. 1. Neither Google nor Apple deserve the trust this requires. Seriously! 2. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are arguably pushing tons of resources which will directly harm all current and future human societies. It is not what this precedent will do for us during this epidemic, but afterwards. Also, normalizing tracking is not self fulfilling for Google and Apple, not at all... Thanks for all you hard work?

swiley 7y ago

If you want to restore trust then stop fighting with users and give them control over their devices. iOS is full of dark patterns and a few absolutely awful restrictions that are very anti user. It shouldn’t be surprising that the users don’t trust Apple. (Hopefully this doesn’t come across as disrespectful, I think the work you guys have done on contact tracing is awesome.)

jb775 7y ago

Distrust and caution are the parents of security. - Benjamin Franklin

fossuser 7y ago

Yeah, there’s so little critical thinking going on in general. I wish people really tried to understand rather than just give knee-jerk negative responses to go along with their existing world view. A lot of people are trying to do the right thing and working hard to do good. The cynical HN default response just feels like a lazy way to try and signal intelligence.

rapsey 7y ago
Edward snowden, gag laws and the history of FBI/CIA is what any educated critical thinking person needs to understand why these apps should not be trusted. Apple and Google may have good intentions. But if there is one thing clear from history is that if anything can be abused it will be. Maybe not now but it certainly will eventually.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Sure - and there are nuanced/interesting discussions that can happen about the risks, but that’s not what most of this commentary is. Most of the comments are empty of any actual content from people who haven’t even tried to read about the protocol they’re working on. The protocol is designed by people aware and concerned about these risks (which is why the way it works is pretty interesting). A lot of interesting work happens in the challenging areas where it’s critical to get things right, there are real risks, and the answers aren’t obvious. Engaging in those areas where things are complex is important. It's easy to just remove yourself from the problem, say something can't be trusted, and then feel good about your moral purity, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. It does, and there is real value in putting work in to solve it. If you care about these issues then you're the type of person that should be involved in solving it exactly because you're concerned about the risks. Jeff Hammerbacher's quote from working at Facebook reminds me of this, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.” I think he's right, and working on these bigger non-ad software problems is where the effort should be, because they are hard, and because the outcome is important. The governments of the west need to be capable, but still protect the privacy of their people - that isn't an easy problem.

mcantelon 7y ago

Institutions earned their current distrust.

adatavizguy 7y ago

We are culturally obsessed with "Luke, trust your feelings." There is something extremely wrong and dangerous with Star Wars and that idea to put away reason and just trust our feelings. Joseph Campbell what did you do?

cl3m 7y ago
Maybe not everything can be explained with reason, the unconscious mind can play its part.

arcticbull 7y ago

As a former Apple employee, it's gutsy for you to post this, or anything, certainly on a controversial topic. You don't work for the kind of employer that values someone sticking their head out and saying ... anything. They want to control the message, and saying anything may be worse for both you, and for Apple, than saying nothing. Just be careful. Apple's got the people to manage this PR situation.

juuul 7y ago
As someone else commented, this is one of the reasons why trusting companies like Apple is a bad idea. Even if employees had real concerns about a technology, or wanted to discuss the pros/cons, we would never hear about it. It should be obvious why a strong focus on secrecy and "controlling the message" breeds distrust.
- shuckles 7y ago
  The appropriate venue to discuss concerns with technology in a forum that will actually impact it is rarely a public message board.
rapnie 7y ago
That does not imbibe more trust in me regarding the corporate world, Apple this time. Big corporates have done many things to erode it, just like governments did. As we all know, trust leaves on horseback, comes back on foot. And in current 'distrust-first' society with populism feeding the gut, it may not come back at all for quite some time.
alkonaut 7y ago
> it's gutsy for you to post this, That comment seems completely neutral. Not being able to post that comment without worrying about consequences sounds absolutely dystopian.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  It's Apple, that's how it works. You've frequently got no idea what the person down the hallway is working on.

PeterStuer 7y ago

I find it disingenuous that u use antivax in your argument. First of all the tech industry has been thriving on selling out and exploiting personal data for decades, and this 'business model' has become in practice unavoidable on the online world. And while big pharma has many deep flaws, making people deliberately ill through vaxination programs isn't it. Secondly, everyone that understands low powered radio wave signals and keeps abrest of covid-19 infection vectors can plainly see that any correlation between those two are going to be extremely weak at best, and extremely easy to game. No vaxine with such poor results would be allowed on the market, let alone prescribed. This is a bad case of tech utopist solutioning gone awry.

Legogris 7y ago

Release the source code and provide some mechanism for users to have verifiable proof that the published code matches the application running on the device and we can start talking about trust. Given past track record of both companies, this is the only way I would ever have of not being skeptical.

nindalf 7y ago
Do you have some evidence that Apple and Google run backdoors to privacy on iOS or Android devices? You speak about the track record of both companies, surely you should be able to point out several examples of this. The spec seems pretty clear - it's not possible. If you feel that you don't trust them to implement the spec correctly due to incompetence or malice on their part - you need to supply the proof. If we're relying on your gut feel to be skeptical, you just look like an anti-vaxxer saying "I don't trust Big Pharma's vaccines based on my gut feel."
- Legogris 7y ago
  There's arguably a lot more evidence against Google than Apple here. But Apple did lie about their involvement, or even knowledge of, the PRISM program. Snowden leaks. I highly recommend Glenn Grennwald's book No Place to Hide if you're not interested in digging though sources yourself. Even against their will, companies with capabilities can and have been compelled by government agencies to go against their promises and lie about it. Additionally, with organizations of this size, it's very plausible that the vast majority of employees and even executives are blissfully unaware of wrongdoings, abuse and involvement in conspiracy by individual employees or decision makers. All it takes is a single compromised or malicious person to add new capabilities in an update to an already rolled-out and well-intentioned software. Possibly a handful if you add strongly enforced and audited mechanisms for co-signing releases and whatnot.
  - nindalf 7y ago
    I've read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. It doesn't get more detailed than that. There is nothing in the book that indicates that Google's implementation of the contact tracing spec would deviate from the spec either through incompetence or malice. You're making vague, unsubstantiated claims about how this could be compromised. Even if there is a bug that allows such apps to collect location info, that has nothing to do with Snowden leaks. If a government is keen on collecting such information, they would simply not use Google/Apple's APIs and instead roll their own using bluetooth and location services. This was pointed out in the article. Now could you explain to us why you're promoting a conspiracy theory that the government will lean on Apple and Google to introduce malicious bugs into their APIs when they don't need the APIs at all?

matheusmoreira 7y ago

How's anti-vaccination in any way comparable to lack of trust in corporations? We have decades of evidence showing the efficacy of vaccines. Ask any old pediatrician what hospitals were like before vaccines. Can Apple and Google produce equally strong evidence that their new surveillance system will reduce mortality and be resistant to abuse?

a1369209993 7y ago
More to the point, we have decades of evidence showing the efficacy of vaccines, and we have decades of evidence showing that corporations cannot be trusted with anything and that it's always a matter of when, not if, they back on any promise they've made.

verve_rat 7y ago

Apple is not an "institution". A arm of government or a long standing NGO are institutions. Apple is a business, it shouldn't get institutional trust.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> A arm of government or a long standing NGO are institutions The New York Times is neither of those, yet many people would characterize it, alongside the Fourth Estate, as institutions. The term "institution" codes depth beyond legal form [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution

killjoywashere 7y ago

As a lifelong public servant, welcome to the ungrateful side of life. If you're providing a service to the public with the hopes of their gratitude, you will be sad. Do it for the same reason you change your baby's diaper: you love them and it needs doing. They might take pleasure in pissing on you while you're doing it, but this thing you love will be better off afterward.

the_gipsy 7y ago
Let's not compare apple to a public institution. What apple does is in the interest of the shareholders and nothing else.
- spdustin 7y ago
  Perhaps the institutional shareholders have Apple holdings precisely because their privacy-centric practices increase their stability, independence, and profit—without having to sell out their customers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - sumedh 7y ago
    No, they hold it just to get a return on their investment.
- mrlala 7y ago
  >What apple does is in the interest of the shareholders and nothing else Honestly what is with this attitude? Yeah, I get it.. you took a business class and learned that everything a company does should be to maximize shareholder value. But welcome to the real world. Sure the company wants to make money, but they also want to provide a valuable service. Yeah sometimes making money gets in the way with the best product they could offer. But it's people making the decisions of what to make. It's people who use the software (let's say osx/ios) that want to make it better. It's developers who sit there are think how can they improve this feature so it's great for people.

toper-centage 7y ago

Unfortunately, these companies earned our distrust and cynicism. I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I can't bring myself to believe that Google and - to a lesser extent - Apple are not going to record this data. I also don't believe that American companies have the liberty to disobey the US government and their letter agencies if they request this data to be recorded for them to abuse later. And for that reason, I will be disabling any tracking on my phone.

stilisstuk 7y ago

Pertaining to 'institutional trust'. One ought to be able to trust e.g. government. Alas you can not (I am a public servant). One should never unequivocally trust for-profit companies. Also: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszcms https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszcms

zajio1am 7y ago
Making such big difference between government and (big) companies seems naive. One should never trust neither government nor companies. They are not that different, both are power structures with vastly more power and different concerns and priorities than an individual. There are many parallels between them. Companies run on economic power, government run on political (and also economic and hard) power. Companies are kept at bay by market forces, government by democratic process. Both of them may work or fail (monopolies in market, different kinds of identity politics in democratic process). Both companies and government can do extraordinary good (when incentives are well aligned and leaders are competent) and extraordinary bad (when either is not true). Both can empower petty tyrants inside their hierarchies. The reasonable way is to keep both dependent on each other and to limit each to their own domain.

m12k 7y ago

I think the notion of trusting any company over a certain size is crazy - I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing companies that way. Basically, I can trust specific people if I feel that I know their character, and by proxy I might trust a company that these people have significant control over. Once a company reaches a certain size, any power that individual employees wield will have been diluted to microscopic levels, and even founders' altruistic motivations tend to fade or get drowned out by the basic profit motives of an increasingly large group of shareholders. At that point, it's not a matter of trusting, it's at best a matter of recognizing if the strategic goals of the company aligns with my interests in specific ways. For example Apple has made a strategic choice to double down on privacy, because invading privacy is not core to their business the way it is to Google and Facebook, so this allows them to gain an edge over their rivals. Great, that's something. That doesn't mean I "trust" Apple the way I would a person - it's more akin to how I'd recognize when a wild animal doesn't view humans as prey, so I'm willing to get relatively close to them without protective equipment. I don't trust them in general, I don't expect them to care about me at all, but I trust them to follow their instinct, which is to not attack me unprovoked.

devin 7y ago
What??? I cannot make any sense out of your comment. No disrespect, but you're jumping around a lot and I do not follow. ETA: Allow me to explain for the downvoters: The size of the company is irrelevant. There are plenty of large companies that have honest leadership. I can trust a fraction of the size of the company, because I trust those people to not work for horrible companies. Trusting a human being and trusting an organized group of them are obviously different. Your personal alignment with a company's goals has nothing to do with whether said company is trustworthy. You can trust a company to meet its goals without becoming best friends with it. The goals here are quite clear. The spec has been published. Apple and Google are well poised to meet the goal at hand. Truly, who else is going to do this right now with the same level of resources, and how long are you willing to wait for it? Finally, I found the analogy of wild, dangerous animals to companies extremely weird in light of the fact that you started your comment with "I wish people would stop anthropomorphizing".
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neiman 7y ago

> feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust The main mistake is that you compare, emotionally at least, Apple to an institute. But it's not, it's a commercial company. "We" never had or should have had any trust in commercial companies - maybe besides small ones as someone else noted here. The problem is that as a society we allowed a few commercial companies to become such an inherent part of our lives.

devin 7y ago
The size of the company doesn’t matter. Small companies are not inherently less evil. You can have a company with no VC backing or shareholders and screw over your customers at every turn. The idea that the size of the organization is directly related to whether or not it is worth trusting is ridiculous. Just because I don’t know everyone at a hospital doesn’t mean they aren’t worth trusting.
- neiman 7y ago
  I was referring to this comment, I agree with what's written there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077187

boudin 7y ago

Apple doesn't make it easy to be liked overall. For example, trying to get 30% of a company revenue to publish an app on ios store and push the arrogance all the way to ask a company to change its business model is insane. I'm not gonna go all the way to ask to be able to build or test things in containers, but at least do it easily in virtual machines legally without having to buy or rent some apple hardware for no good reason. Why not even being able to build ios apps outside of macos? There's no technical reason not to be able to do so neither. For me, the discrepancy between apple marketing around the products and how it feels being stuck in the past as soon as having to build and support anything related to apple makes the whole company not likeable and not trustworthy.

flukus 7y ago

> but I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge Why do you assume we ever had that trust? Corporations and Government have never had personal data on such a scale before and we've never had such little control over this data. Especially with google, your expecting us to trust a spyware company. > The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process Anti-vaxers have been around as long as vaccinations have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#History I'd say this trust has never existed, there was just an illusion that it was because we couldn't see into others bubbles so easily.

rorykoehler 7y ago

Companies shouldn't be allow to become as rich and powerful as Apple. We're supposed to live in a democratic system. Corporate power on the scale of FAANG is the antithesis of democracy.

have_faith 7y ago
Thought experiment: People willingly giving this power over to an alternative group of people (a company in this case) could be considered a democratic vote from a populace? Providing power is willingly given to them by the actions of the group.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  At best people are voting for who has the best product or service to solve their immediate needs. I don't buy Apple products (and I'm fully in the Apple ecosystem) because of Apple's great vision for how society should develop. Democracy operates on a different plane.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
So a democratic system that ignores property rights when it suits the mob that is not actually Democratic.
- andrekandre 7y ago
  property rights of companies or individuals? democracy is about individual freedoms and rights, not necessarily those of profit-seeking entities
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    And are not individual workers "profit-seeking entities" btw I do own Apple shares so what about my rights not to have those expropriated.
  - zajio1am 7y ago
    Corporations are just legal conctructs to easily define rights and powers of their owners. So property rights of companies are just property rights of their owners.

toofy 7y ago

> ...but I feel like as a society we’ve swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. I understand and completely empathize with your concern. I do think this lack of trust is and is going to cause very serious problems. However, this mistrust has been earned. The incentives of large companies seem to be odds with what many people consider good for themselves or their communities. We like to tell ourselves that a company’s goals must align with a community’s concerns or another company will come along and replace them. But this doesn’t seem to happen in reality and if it does, it can take decades which by that time, the damage is already done. Particularly if the company is above a certain size or retain a certain percent of their market. At scale companies can and regularly do act almost antagonistic towards their customers and the communities in which they live. During some college research I found an older article from years ago and while I’ve looked repeatedly, I haven’t been able to find it again (If anyone knows it, please please let me know.) I’m running off of memory here so forgive me for the weak description. The author had researched and discovered how most very large companies used to require that every move they made would place a very high value on how it would impact their local community first and then place a high value on how the decision would impact their wider customer’s communities. These considerations played a massive role in whether or not they would move forward with the idea. If I’m remembering correctly this was written into these massive companies bylaws. Their first concern wasn’t regarding profit, it was about community impacts, and then profit came later in the decision. I think we’ve gotten too far away from this and it’s going to cause even more damage than we’ve already seen. We’re so far away from this ideal and now an awful lot of companies will first decide if they can get away with something and if it will cause quarterly growth, then it’s worth moving forward on with little thought into wider impacts. This change has led to little if any thought going into the community wide second and third order effects. The fallout means we’re now dealing with a drastic diminishing trust in companies. I share your concerns because I don’t think large organizations are inherently untrustworthy, and I know many (if not most) people inside these organizations have higher ideals and many companies have the best of intentions, but I think their hands are tied by systemic problems and these problems are eroding at fundamental societal trust systems.

a_imho 7y ago

Equating anti vaxxers with corporate skeptics is a surefire way to build trust /s

AJRF 7y ago

Institutional trust has been eroding since Watergate and almost non-existent since Snowden leaks. Seeing Apples name on the PRISM slide was a gut bunch, you dont and will never get blind trust anymore. Saying this is similar to the anti-vax movement is so frustrating for me to read when special closed courts are set up in my country to deliver verdicts on the legality of data acquisition and they STILL found the GCHQ overeached and illegally spied on citizens. The UK gov has even decided to not use the API provided by Apple here so if I could trust Apple (which I don't) its being undermined by the fact the government decided to take Palantir on to help make it and it looks like they are getting involved in the US effort too.

dastx 7y ago
Yeah but it is still Palantir, so maybe don't trust the government's judgement that much.

throwawaylolx 7y ago

Amazing. A pretentious, emotionally-manipulative version of "if you don't trust closed-sourced public corporate #43214 you're basically an anti-vaxxer!" is the most upvoted comment in this HN thread. Hilarious

choward 7y ago

> I have to say, working at Apple and knowing all the hard work that goes into this and making sure your data stays private while also being able to combat this disease, it's very frustrating to read a lot of the comments here. As a person reading comments it's frustrating that an Apple employee thinks their company is special and should be trusted. It doesn't matter what you say, at the end of the day your goal is the same as any other company: profit. There's a zero percent chance I will install any of your garbage on my phone on purpose.

HatchedLake721 7y ago
Disgusting comment. A person is genuinely invested and passionate about privacy (and we know Apple’s stance on privacy, from Steve Jobs, to their stance with FBI, privacy tsars, keeping data on the phone, Secure Enclave, etc) and you call their work garbage.
- choward 7y ago
  > A person is genuinely invested and passionate about privacy...and you call their work garbage. I'm referring to the output of Google and Apple as garbage. You're the one trying to make this personal. I don't really care that an individual cares about privacy. It has nothing to do with the machine they are a part of. > and we know Apple’s stance on privacy No we don't. We don't "know" anything. Are you serious?
dordoka 7y ago
To be able to install anything that uses the new contact tracing stuff, you must own a phone that is based either on iOS or Android. I'm honestly curious: if you are using any of those already, is that not even worse than this "garbage" you talk about?
- choward 7y ago
  I actually posted my comment from my Android phone. And yes, it is garbage.

aguyfromnb 7y ago

>just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, The anti-vaxxers may be wrong, but boiling it down to a "celebrity's feels" seriously underestimates the movement, and likely adds to the reasons these people don't trust the institutions.

pjc50 7y ago

> I feel like as a society we've swung so far away from institutional trust that now nothing good can actually emerge. The anti-vax movement is a perfect example where the collective work of thousands of people over decades to save millions of lives just gets tossed aside because some celebrity 'feels' like there's a connection that isn't there, and in the process, the level of public harm becomes severe This is not an accident. A great deal of work has gone into destroying public trust and the capacity of institutions to make impartial decisions based on data. Partly from the profit motive, partly for destructive political purposes. And a lot of people in the tech industry and on here actively support the right to destroy that work by posting the most thoroughly debunked and dangerous lies on popular tech platforms - again for their own ideological purposes.

monkeynotes 7y ago

Give me an example from history where everyday 'papers please' has worked out well. There are many reasons to challenge broad authoritarian policy. Don't pollute the dialog with anti-vaxers, that shuts down a completely legitimate conversation that should happen in a healthy society. Accepting wide-spread social tracking unchallenged is worrisome. I should not have to explain to intelligent minds why. The paths you open up when you allow something like social compliance tracking and scoring are just terrifying. Way more terrifying for our children than the immediate health problems.

AlexandrB 7y ago

I think I trust Apple more than any other FAANG company, but that's like saying you're the cleanest hog in the pen. Even if it's true, it doesn't necessarily mean much and you're still tarred by association. The tech industry has burned through trust at a blistering pace in the last decade and it's hard not to be cynical.

wltprgm 7y ago

I do think that open sourcing and transparency matter a lot in this era. Do that first before claiming the hard work, if not what's the difference between a mad scientist and a doctor?