3 ms·

Escaped the clutches of Google and ran into the warm embrace of benevolent big daddy Apple.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
They're not even remotely comparable. For Google Maps to work effectively, you have to let Google record your location every five minutes until eternity, which it can and does use for ad tailoring. Apple Maps doesn't associate any location or direction data with account information and goes out of it's way to scramble the data it does store a bit so that people can't be identified.
- matmatmatmat 6y ago
  Is that true? I have location services turned off unless I'm using Google Maps to navigate, and it seems to do a fine job getting me from A to B.
  - izacus 6y ago
    No, it's not. Location History is something you can disable (or set to autodelete history) and Maps will work just fine without it.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    The issue I found when I tried using Google apps without invasive data tracking was that Google has no middle ground: Either you let it know everywhere you are at all times, or it doesn't even retain location search history of any kind or even suggest locations close to you. I feel like a navigation app should be like a weather app in what it knows about me: Roughly, what zip code I'm in. Google Maps without location history doesn't even act that smart, it's too dependent on invasive tracking.
- Jkvngt 6y ago
  Apple's very keen on telling us the ways they protect our privacy, but let's be crystal clear - there's no way whatsoever to audit these claims, and Apple willingly joined PRISM.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    The PRISM partners claim is still pretty interesting: Like some other computer security scares (Supermicro?), years later, the PRISM partners slide has never been corroborated by anyone since. And there's a lot of evidence that companies listed on it have actively fought government collection strategies. If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc. It is true most web services are impossible to audit the privacy of, as always, storing things yourself on hardware you control is the safest, but I'd argue that Google and Apple have very clearly different stances, if you follow the money.
    - Jkvngt 6y ago
      >If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc. None of this is convincing, these open ended musings have other answers like, perhaps this infrastructure change was needed to protect against the compromised backbone routers (revealed later by Shadow Brokers release) which it turns out anybody could tap, device encryption, which handy, has had lots of oopsies and gotchas over time which one could almost suspect were planted. Last year Apple relented and allowed a dead man's family to retrieve photos even though nobody knew the login information. Hm, but I was told by people here on Hacker News and in tech journalism that Apple DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE CAPABILITY to do this.

They're not even remotely comparable. For Google Maps to work effectively, you have to let Google record your location every five minutes until eternity, which it can and does use for ad tailoring. Apple Maps doesn't associate any location or direction data with account information and goes out of it's way to scramble the data it does store a bit so that people can't be identified.

matmatmatmat 6y ago
Is that true? I have location services turned off unless I'm using Google Maps to navigate, and it seems to do a fine job getting me from A to B.
- izacus 6y ago
  No, it's not. Location History is something you can disable (or set to autodelete history) and Maps will work just fine without it.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The issue I found when I tried using Google apps without invasive data tracking was that Google has no middle ground: Either you let it know everywhere you are at all times, or it doesn't even retain location search history of any kind or even suggest locations close to you. I feel like a navigation app should be like a weather app in what it knows about me: Roughly, what zip code I'm in. Google Maps without location history doesn't even act that smart, it's too dependent on invasive tracking.
Jkvngt 6y ago
Apple's very keen on telling us the ways they protect our privacy, but let's be crystal clear - there's no way whatsoever to audit these claims, and Apple willingly joined PRISM.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The PRISM partners claim is still pretty interesting: Like some other computer security scares (Supermicro?), years later, the PRISM partners slide has never been corroborated by anyone since. And there's a lot of evidence that companies listed on it have actively fought government collection strategies. If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc. It is true most web services are impossible to audit the privacy of, as always, storing things yourself on hardware you control is the safest, but I'd argue that Google and Apple have very clearly different stances, if you follow the money.
  - Jkvngt 6y ago
    >If these companies were willing participants, Google would not have started encrypting it's datacenter linkages which were subject to NSA fiber taps, Apple wouldn't have continually sought to improve device encryption to defeat law enforcement, etc. None of this is convincing, these open ended musings have other answers like, perhaps this infrastructure change was needed to protect against the compromised backbone routers (revealed later by Shadow Brokers release) which it turns out anybody could tap, device encryption, which handy, has had lots of oopsies and gotchas over time which one could almost suspect were planted. Last year Apple relented and allowed a dead man's family to retrieve photos even though nobody knew the login information. Hm, but I was told by people here on Hacker News and in tech journalism that Apple DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE CAPABILITY to do this.