5 ms·
Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?
by travoc 5y ago
Are we allowed to have an opinion about which company is better for our privacy?
- croes 5y agoIf both are bad, does it matter which is less bad?
- ceejayoz 5y agoYes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- joconde 5y agoYes definitely. There are a lot of nuances in privacy. As an example, take the approach to ML and assistants, where Google collects most of everything to train models on their servers, while Apple tries to anonymize things a bit (e.g. their “differential privacy” techniques).
- ikurei 5y agoWell, yes, of course it does. I'm willing to limit what apps I use and carefully consider what I install. I'm not yet willing to abandon my smartphone. Choosing the lesser of N evils is a pretty common and often rational choice, in life and in engineering. May be not in this case, and it's good to be unsatisfied, but disregarding the debate just because neither option is great makes no sense.
- croes 5y agoChoosing the lesser of N evils only makes sense if one is acceptable. If neither is, a choice is useless. Both sides have an unacceptable amount of tracking and your choice doesn't really have any consequences.
- derefr 5y agoNaively, because it only takes two suppliers in a market, for consumers to start playing them against each-other by switching to whichever one plays more to consumer preferences at any given moment, incentivizing the suppliers to compete to satisfy that consumer preference. Like a classical "race to the bottom" that lowers prices, but with some other factor that consumers care about instead of cost. (Of course, this assumes people bother to switch. In reality, this isn't even true in oligopolist party politics, let alone in oligopolist markets. In practice, there need to be a lot more, smaller options before switching costs are forced down enough to encourage people to switch. In phone markets, this looks like how people switch somewhat easily between different Android device manufacturers for their next phone. If we could get phone Operating Systems working like that, we'd really have something!)
- smoldesu 5y agoYou're welcome to say whatever you want, but if you genuinely believe that the NSA gives preferential treatment to anyone from FAANG you're living a fever dream.
- shawnz 5y agoOn the other hand, who else besides FAANG has the resources to resist the NSA, at least in small ways?
- ForHackernews 5y agoThe Chinese and the Russians. Who wants to buy a Yandex phone?
- YarickR2 5y agoWhat's wrong with Yandex phone ?
- Mikeb85 5y agoIt's not about resources, it's about reach and jurisdiction. If anything, FAANGs have the most incentive to cooperate with the NSA because they're located in the US and have the most to lose. The companies that can best resist the NSA are located outside of the US and EU.
- imwillofficial 5y agoApple has had high profile fights with USgov on their privacy stances. Google has not.
- Mikeb85 5y agoAnd yet they're cooperating with the government all the same. Literally just marketing... With Google, you at least know what to expect. How many promises has Apple broken now?