4 ms·
For any company, ask why they'd actually care about doing the right thing. Is it reputation? Integrity? Is the reasoning purely financial? Then ask whether th
by johnklos 5y ago
For any company, ask why they'd actually care about doing the right thing.
Is it reputation? Integrity? Is the reasoning purely financial?
Then ask whether the company operates in a way that suggests they'd do the profitable thing over the right thing if they think they might get away with it. Does that picture look realistic?
As an example, look at Apple. Leaving the tangential discussion about scanning iCloud photos for CSAM aside, they are a company that claims to care about users and about privacy. Whereas every other company is literally trying to send all data to the cloud, Apple is telling us they're working to process everything they can on the device itself.
What would happen if they were caught selling location data? Caught allowing companies direct access to data aggregated from users that they explicitly say they're not collecting? They'd stand to lose literally many billions of dollars of sales because the thing differentiating them from everyone else would be erased.
Which is greater - those billions of dollars of sales as a premium device maker, or those scraps of money they'd make from underhandedly selling data?
Now look at the same scenario but with Facebook, or Google - is it the same? No, because we have no realistic expectation of privacy with either company. They're in the news quite often because they're doing nefarious things, allowing access to data most people didn't even know they're collecting, yet people aren't really doing things differently because of the news.
Imagine the same with companies like ExpressVPN. How much would a disclosure hurt them? How much money could they possibly make by selling private data? Do they employ the kind of people who'd take the gamble between the two?
- s_dev 5y agoJust look at Proton Mail removing the "We don't log IPs" claim from their website last week after it emerged they are forced to log IPs .
- eldaisfish 5y agothis is a bad faith argument. Proton logged IPs in response to Swiss court order and handed over that data after the order was received. They do not log IPs otherwise. And bear in mind, the specific request in question here had the involvement of the French state as well.
- vore 5y agoHow is this a bad faith argument? Proton's claim was they didn't log IPs and then it turns out that in certain cases they do – regardless of the reason, they reneged on their claim.
- bjohnson225 5y agoTheir original claim was that they don’t log IPs by default, not that they don’t log them even when required by law.
- mdavis6890 5y agoBecause the way it was phrased might imply that Proton had always been logging all IPs, despite their claim, when in reality the breach was of a much smaller scope than that. They only logged IPs for a particular user after a particular legal demand was made, and not otherwise (as far as I know).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adamdusty 5y agoI have never in my life met anyone that has an iPhone or a Mac because Apple is processing everything on the device itself. People have iPhone and macs for 2 reasons. iMessage and because Apple is a premium brand that even that richest of richest people use. The money Apple would lose if they started mining your data like Facebook would be indistinguishable from random noise.
- badsoftware 5y agoI am in the Apple ecosystem primarily for privacy reasons. We exist.
- julietdg 5y agoPrivacy online or anywhere is an absolute psyops. Everything is logged recorded and stored. Every website visited, every email opened or sent, every text message sent or received. No matter who the company is.
- gizdan 5y agoThey're not at the level of Facebook and Google, but they still mine your data. You've gained nothing.
- StevenRayOrr 5y agoI'm more comfortable with Apple's decisions than some on Hackers News, so take this with a grain of salt... but the difference between what Google/Facebook does and Apple does is a difference. It may not be as vast a difference as Apple claims, but it's also not nothing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]