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Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple de

Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.

marxisttemp 2y ago
I wouldn’t say all of the privacy changes or even the majority of them are to ensure lock-in, but they have certainly been using their privacy stance as a pretext for lock-in.
- katzinsky 2y ago
  If Apple cared about privacy ssh would be well supported OOTB and you'd be able to build your apps from the source. There's no way to do this, even if you pay all the fees push notifications won't work unless you publish to the app store and that will get rejected for being a duplicate.
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    Like all corporations, Apple only cares about making a profit. Their business model let them implement much stronger privacy guarantees than their competitors, and this differentiation has been a profitable avenue for them. But ultimately if there’s any lock-down they can get away with (i.e. without affecting their profits either directly or via fines and legislation) they’ll try it, and privacy/security misfeatures are a great way to couch these regressions without appearing directly hostile. That being said, I don’t think Apple’s privacy stance is all hot air, they publish plenty of white papers on their infrastructure. I mostly think they’re greedy and don’t mind harming the user and developer experience to ensure they get their cut from every transaction that occurs inside their ecosystem.
roenxi 2y ago
Which is a great pitch to use Apple devices. The software community seems to hate it but I have a theory that one of the reasons Apple commands such a premium is because regular users don't actually like the software people all that much. Apple protecting user privacy for selfish reasons is a wonderful thing. It means they are going to keep doing it for as long as they can manage until the legislators step in.
- aeurielesn 2y ago
  I would hate to see a world where this sentiment is widespread when others are trying to fight for the right to repair and other causes and Apple is doing nothing but lobbying against them.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  > Apple protecting user privacy It's amazing how successful they are at virtue signaling about privacy while selling your traffic to Google, the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism, for tens of billions of dollars. Laundering the reputation through the slightest bit of indirection is all it takes.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Don't forget Apple's super-safe ultra-private AI collaboration with security mastermind (and former interim Reddit CEO) Sam Altman. When your data enters OpenAI's servers, it's trusted with the same cryptographic geniuses that brought you Worldcoin.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tines 2y ago
[flagged]
- brigadier132 2y ago
  > Apple users are not purchasable in the same way that Google or Meta users are by advertisers. You might have missed the memo but Apple is one of the largest advertising companies in the world. Also, when Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine, what do you think they are paying for?
  - tines 2y ago
    Apple's revenue from advertising is tiny compared to its revenue from other sources, while Google's revenue from other sources is tiny compared to its revenue for advertising.
- taeric 2y ago
  They are not purchasable; but they are revenue generating for Apple, specifically. So, it isn't that off?
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    They are explicitly purchasable. What do you think advertising on the App store is? What do you think Google paying $20 billion to be the default search engine is?
    - taeric 2y ago
      Apologies, I was meaning that as "even if we grant that they are not purchasable." That is, I wasn't wanting to argue the point of if you can directly purchase it, as that doesn't seem important for the point?
      - brigadier132 2y ago
        You're right it isn't necessary to the point and no need to apologize. I just don't want to give apologists for this terrible behavior a rhetorical out.
api 2y ago
Apple is the only big tech company left that even pretends to care about privacy and does even a half-assed job of it. If they're doing it in part for self-interested reasons, that's fine. It's better than nothing. Their cloud storage product even has on-device encryption. Nobody else offers that, and in fact AFAIK Google and some of the others even have it listed as against their ToS. They're also working on privacy-respecting AI services and on-device AI as a first class citizen, which is different from any other company. All other AI products are designed for maximum privacy invasion. Google, Microsoft, and the entire mobile app ecosystem are all actively hostile to user privacy and seek to undermine it as a primary mission and policy.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. What you have right now is just a centralized store of all your data on Apple's servers.
  - api 2y ago
    iOS and macOS are not the same product. If you want a real computer you have to get a Mac, which is why I do not own an iPad. IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones. The iPhone does everything I want a phone to do, but that's not much: web, a few apps, turn by turn directions, texting, e-mail, etc.
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      I'm like you and my primary device is my laptop. That being said: For the vast majority of people, their phone is their primary computing device.
      - api 2y ago
        These people are generally not technically knowledgeable at all. If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them. I grew up with the open Internet starting in the 1990s. I feel like a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around just how hostile and riddled with scams and hustler bullshit it's become. The mobile ecosystem is the worst, possibly even more user-hostile than the web. The potential for privacy invasion is a lot higher too since people carry their phones around. The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war. The iPhone is actually not locked down enough to protect most users' privacy.
haswell 2y ago
If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers? > All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users… This is reductionist, and multiple things can be true at the same time. There’s no doubt that Apple has realized privacy is a competitive advantage, and as a customer, it’s one of the reasons I give them money. Even if you could lay bare the deepest desires and true motives of everyone involved, the result of those motives is a product that is more private and more secure than most alternatives. To boil this down to “this is only about lock-in” completely sidesteps a myriad of other factors in play. Editing to add: I'm not saying Apple is blameless here or that their advertising goals and other business deals shouldn't be scrutinized. I'm not even saying that I buy their privacy marketing, but there is an objective difference between their current model and the companies that exist purely on the basis of selling customer data. I find it really problematic to equate them with the behavior of the Metas and Alphabets of the industry.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  > If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers? Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue. Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization. That's just revenue from one company and that's just to be the default search engine.
  - haswell 2y ago
    When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable. Google is buying search traffic from Apple, not user dossiers. To conflate the two is a category error. Even when you consider Apple’s advertising business, it cannot be argued in good faith that they are behaving in the same way most large advertising-driven companies are operating. Selling ads is not by itself enough to make the claim that “users are the product”, and to whatever extent they are, the ad business is secondary and coexists with their core business of selling hardware and services. This remains a meaningful distinction for people who want to buy products not fully predicated on selling their private details. The reductionist take removes all context and makes it impossible to have a substantive discussion about these finer points, and reductionism in general is against site guidelines.
matwood 2y ago
> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman. The issue anytime this thread comes up are binary statements like the above. There's a lot more nuance here where privacy changes are likely both. When ATT came out it was good for the user, but also poked FB in the eye which I'm sure Apple enjoyed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

marxisttemp 2y ago

I wouldn’t say all of the privacy changes or even the majority of them are to ensure lock-in, but they have certainly been using their privacy stance as a pretext for lock-in.

katzinsky 2y ago
If Apple cared about privacy ssh would be well supported OOTB and you'd be able to build your apps from the source. There's no way to do this, even if you pay all the fees push notifications won't work unless you publish to the app store and that will get rejected for being a duplicate.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  Like all corporations, Apple only cares about making a profit. Their business model let them implement much stronger privacy guarantees than their competitors, and this differentiation has been a profitable avenue for them. But ultimately if there’s any lock-down they can get away with (i.e. without affecting their profits either directly or via fines and legislation) they’ll try it, and privacy/security misfeatures are a great way to couch these regressions without appearing directly hostile. That being said, I don’t think Apple’s privacy stance is all hot air, they publish plenty of white papers on their infrastructure. I mostly think they’re greedy and don’t mind harming the user and developer experience to ensure they get their cut from every transaction that occurs inside their ecosystem.

roenxi 2y ago

Which is a great pitch to use Apple devices. The software community seems to hate it but I have a theory that one of the reasons Apple commands such a premium is because regular users don't actually like the software people all that much. Apple protecting user privacy for selfish reasons is a wonderful thing. It means they are going to keep doing it for as long as they can manage until the legislators step in.

aeurielesn 2y ago
I would hate to see a world where this sentiment is widespread when others are trying to fight for the right to repair and other causes and Apple is doing nothing but lobbying against them.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
> Apple protecting user privacy It's amazing how successful they are at virtue signaling about privacy while selling your traffic to Google, the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism, for tens of billions of dollars. Laundering the reputation through the slightest bit of indirection is all it takes.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Don't forget Apple's super-safe ultra-private AI collaboration with security mastermind (and former interim Reddit CEO) Sam Altman. When your data enters OpenAI's servers, it's trusted with the same cryptographic geniuses that brought you Worldcoin.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tines 2y ago

[flagged]

brigadier132 2y ago
> Apple users are not purchasable in the same way that Google or Meta users are by advertisers. You might have missed the memo but Apple is one of the largest advertising companies in the world. Also, when Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine, what do you think they are paying for?
- tines 2y ago
  Apple's revenue from advertising is tiny compared to its revenue from other sources, while Google's revenue from other sources is tiny compared to its revenue for advertising.
taeric 2y ago
They are not purchasable; but they are revenue generating for Apple, specifically. So, it isn't that off?
- brigadier132 2y ago
  They are explicitly purchasable. What do you think advertising on the App store is? What do you think Google paying $20 billion to be the default search engine is?
  - taeric 2y ago
    Apologies, I was meaning that as "even if we grant that they are not purchasable." That is, I wasn't wanting to argue the point of if you can directly purchase it, as that doesn't seem important for the point?
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      You're right it isn't necessary to the point and no need to apologize. I just don't want to give apologists for this terrible behavior a rhetorical out.

api 2y ago

Apple is the only big tech company left that even pretends to care about privacy and does even a half-assed job of it. If they're doing it in part for self-interested reasons, that's fine. It's better than nothing. Their cloud storage product even has on-device encryption. Nobody else offers that, and in fact AFAIK Google and some of the others even have it listed as against their ToS. They're also working on privacy-respecting AI services and on-device AI as a first class citizen, which is different from any other company. All other AI products are designed for maximum privacy invasion. Google, Microsoft, and the entire mobile app ecosystem are all actively hostile to user privacy and seek to undermine it as a primary mission and policy.

brigadier132 2y ago
Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. What you have right now is just a centralized store of all your data on Apple's servers.
- api 2y ago
  iOS and macOS are not the same product. If you want a real computer you have to get a Mac, which is why I do not own an iPad. IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones. The iPhone does everything I want a phone to do, but that's not much: web, a few apps, turn by turn directions, texting, e-mail, etc.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    I'm like you and my primary device is my laptop. That being said: For the vast majority of people, their phone is their primary computing device.
    - api 2y ago
      These people are generally not technically knowledgeable at all. If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them. I grew up with the open Internet starting in the 1990s. I feel like a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around just how hostile and riddled with scams and hustler bullshit it's become. The mobile ecosystem is the worst, possibly even more user-hostile than the web. The potential for privacy invasion is a lot higher too since people carry their phones around. The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war. The iPhone is actually not locked down enough to protect most users' privacy.

haswell 2y ago

If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers? > All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users… This is reductionist, and multiple things can be true at the same time. There’s no doubt that Apple has realized privacy is a competitive advantage, and as a customer, it’s one of the reasons I give them money. Even if you could lay bare the deepest desires and true motives of everyone involved, the result of those motives is a product that is more private and more secure than most alternatives. To boil this down to “this is only about lock-in” completely sidesteps a myriad of other factors in play. Editing to add: I'm not saying Apple is blameless here or that their advertising goals and other business deals shouldn't be scrutinized. I'm not even saying that I buy their privacy marketing, but there is an objective difference between their current model and the companies that exist purely on the basis of selling customer data. I find it really problematic to equate them with the behavior of the Metas and Alphabets of the industry.

brigadier132 2y ago
> If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers? Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue. Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization. That's just revenue from one company and that's just to be the default search engine.
- haswell 2y ago
  When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable. Google is buying search traffic from Apple, not user dossiers. To conflate the two is a category error. Even when you consider Apple’s advertising business, it cannot be argued in good faith that they are behaving in the same way most large advertising-driven companies are operating. Selling ads is not by itself enough to make the claim that “users are the product”, and to whatever extent they are, the ad business is secondary and coexists with their core business of selling hardware and services. This remains a meaningful distinction for people who want to buy products not fully predicated on selling their private details. The reductionist take removes all context and makes it impossible to have a substantive discussion about these finer points, and reductionism in general is against site guidelines.

matwood 2y ago

> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman. The issue anytime this thread comes up are binary statements like the above. There's a lot more nuance here where privacy changes are likely both. When ATT came out it was good for the user, but also poked FB in the eye which I'm sure Apple enjoyed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]