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While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users ex
by al_borland 1y ago
While this seems like a lot, in some ways this is what user's expect. Push notifications should be coming all the time, assuming the system is on. Most users expect various maintenance services to run when the system idle so it doesn't interfere with their active use of the system. When users open apps like Weather (or view a widget), they expect it to already be up to date without having to manually refresh or wait for data to load when the app launches.
I'm sure some fat can be trimmed, and it may not all be user-centric, but a lot of this had to do with the expectations users have these days with the data being always up to date, instantly available, and proactive about alerting them to things they may want to know about, like rain coming to your area in 30 minutes.
One of my big pet peeves is when I pick up my phone in the morning, go to open an app, and it starts updating, so I need to wait for the download/install. It just had 8 hours on a charger to do that, and instead it seems to wait until it's taken off the charger and unlocked. With auto-updates on, I'd much rather this happen when placed on the charger and inactive, than actively in use and off the charger. The same can be said for a lot of things on the desktop.
This ends up mostly being a question of transparency and user control. Which then becomes a question of how much time/money to they invest in features for 1% of users? Now how much time do they invest in those same features when the 99% will stumble in there, turn a bunch of stuff off, then call support and ask why their weather widget isn't updating?
- neogodless 1y agoWhen Microsoft has telemetry: * Windows is a spyware machine - how can anyone use it? Year of Linux baby! When Apple has telemetry: * It's working as expected. So... to be fair, is there a thorough comparison of the two? How are they the same, and how are they different?
- jamesy0ung 1y agoApple is nowhere near as evil as Microsoft, so I’m willing to put up with it.
- righthand 1y agoApple has been involved in all the same government spying programs as Microsoft. They do not offer any services or products with E2E encryption that they do not control the key too.
- pmarreck 1y agoBut at least they have E2E encryption. The whole point of which is not having the key to.
- righthand 1y agoThe whole point is that a 3rd party (Apple) doesn’t have the key. It’s not real E2E and it’s still susceptible to government overreach.
- danaris 1y agoNot every Apple service is E2E encrypted, but some of them (like iMessage) are, and it's 100% real E2E.
- ImJamal 1y agoIf you do a forgot password and move to a new device do you lose all your chats?
- danaris 1y agoAFAIK, if you can't get a previous device to authenticate your new device, you will indeed lose your chat history. However, I have several devices that can always authenticate for new ones, so I can't verify this empirically.
- pmarreck 1y agoAs the other person stated, in theory yes, but in practice, if you are an "Apple ecosystem" participant, you usually have another Apple device available that you can auth on. https://chatgpt.com/share/684dae83-a980-8004-8226-d6e13a673d66 https://chatgpt.com/share/684dae83-a980-8004-8226-d6e13a673d...
- snehk 1y agoBut the things mentioned in the post above yours have nothing to do with telemetry. They're more like core functions to make the system work at all.
- sitzkrieg 1y agotake a look at fbs.smoot.apple.com and argue that isnt telemetry? why does an os need to hit the internet AT ALL to work? osx doesnt of course
- politelemon 1y agoNo that's incorrect. It is listed in TFA.
- neogodless 1y ago> Which then becomes a question of how much time/money to they invest in features for 1% of users? Now how much time do they invest in those same features when the 99% will stumble in there, turn a bunch of stuff off, then call support and ask why their weather widget isn't updating? That sounds like telemetry?
- al_borland 1y agoThe features I was referring to would be a control panel to list all the various remote calls to let uses micromanage what calls they wanted and which ones they didn’t. Inside of those settings could be options to enable/disable telemetry, sure. But also push notifications, weather updates, virus definition updates, etc.
- brookst 1y agoI didn’t see the person you’re replying to ever mention Microsoft. It seems weird to accuse them of hypocrisy?
- neogodless 1y agoThis is a very valid criticism of my post and many that group "opinions" as if they come from a single source. Here, the top-voted comment is OK with Apple software phoning home, but there's no evidence they are not equally OK with Microsoft software phoning home, so I'm contrasting this popular opinion with another popular opinion elsewhere. Here's one example from a different user, where Microsoft is described as "the big daddy of spyware." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246187 See also this sibling top-level comment from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44256951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44256951
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- daveguy 1y agoMicrosoft put ads in their OS menus. Kindof a stretch to "both sides" this one.
- JCattheATM 1y agoNo it isn't. The context is telemetry and spying, not built in advertising.
- daveguy 1y agoAnd none of the items in the original thread post were about telemetry. They were about functional requirements.
- ffsm8 1y agoI guess you didn't read the article then, there are entries for telemetry. He even helpfully listed the official use case next to the domain name that was accessed.
- ehutch79 1y agoThe people who complain about windows telemetry, arnt going to Mac, they use Arch Linux btw.
- neogodless 1y agoAre you sure Mac users (or at least fans) don't also call or consider Windows telemetry "spyware"? I suspect they hold that opinion too. But yes, Year of the Linux Desktop, baby!
- righthand 1y ago[flagged]
- klodolph 1y agoHonestly I would say “working as expected” for like 99% of Microsoft’s telemetry. I think the only difference is that I fucking hate hate hate OneDrive and so I’m gonna be more upset about the fact that Windows uses it. iCloud does not bother me so I don’t complain about it.
- JohnFen 1y agoApple users tend to trust Apple (whether or not that trust is misplaced is a different topic). Very few people trust Microsoft.
- jjmarr 1y agoIs it even a push notification if you have to fetch them from a server?
- PinguTS 1y agoHow do you think push should work? Any push service works this way. The client contacts the server to be updated. The server gives a no data or a data response. The server cannot magically contact the client.
- j_w 1y agoWell, the server could contact the client. The client would just need to be listening on a port/address that the server knows. Which is completely infeasible for 99.99% of end user devices.
- PinguTS 1y agoWell, then would work for less then 50%. The majority of end user devices are run from within private networks protected from the Internet. If you have connected to your cell provider, then in the majority the cell providers are running their own private networks. For one reason the IPv4 address space is limited as such, that there are no other possibilities. IPv4 is still the important protocol compared to IPv6. Second, it is that those providers, want to protect you. Some don't even allow cross communication. If you devices are connected with Wifi, then there is the very same situation. There is almost no campus, commercial, and home network, that gives you public route-able IP addresses. I only know a view deployments were you get public route-able IP addresses at conferences like C3, EMF, and alike. tl/dr: No, the end user devices is not easily to reach without additional infrastructure.
- juped 1y agoWhat do you think the word "push" means in the word "push"? It doesn't mean "pull", btw.
- thesuitonym 1y ago
- ath92 1y agoRegular users don’t think of push notifications as something that needs to go through some central server owned by Apple. If Alice sends Bob a message, shouldn’t that require only their phones to communicate with one another, without some third party?
- Henchman21 1y agoBut how would they make sure that conversation is safe and approved if it isn’t monitored? (/s for those who need it)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- razemio 1y agoThis would mean, that every app notification needs to contact a different server. Lets say you have 20 Apps that send notifications. 20 different connections would work in the background to fetch updates instead of 1. Privacy vise this is an issue and the reason that messangers like signal and matrix would use their own services on android. However this reduced battery runtime by a good margin and android and ios get more aggressiv at killing background tasks each os iteration. To make things worse, push notifications for matrix and signal where unrealiable, because manufacturers like oneplus, oppo and some others where killing all the background tasks against specification to win the influencer battery tests.
- al_borland 1y agoIn the Alice and Bob scenario, what happens if Bob’s phone is off or doesn’t have a single when Alice sends the message? Does the message just get dropped? Does Alice’s phone keep trying forever to send the message until it gets a response back that Bob got it? How long does it try before giving up? What happens if Alice and Bob are far apart and the phones can’t directly talk, how does Alice in LA send a message to Bob in NY without a 3rd party to relay the message? If regular users don’t think about these things, it’s because they’ve never thought about these ideas at all. If they did, and they are able to think, they should come to the conclusion that a 3rd party is necessary in some form.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- amelius 1y ago> Which then becomes a question of how much time/money to they invest in features for 1% of users? The problem with Apple is that __anyone__ sits in a 1% group of users in one way or the other. But they try to make a one-size-fits-all product. This is in contrast to Linux where everybody can do whatever they like, and most things are opt-in rather than opt-out.
- al_borland 1y agoApple ships to satisfy the 80%. 3rd party devs generally fill the needs of the 20% in various ways. This is no different with Linux. How many Linux users use a desktop environment as-is without any plugins or tweaks? How many Arch users don’t have a single package from the AUR? There are tools like Little Snitch on macOS to monitor and block all kind of network traffic.
- amelius 1y agoThe problem is that you have to tweak it the wrong way. Products you buy should not invade your privacy by default. Note that this holds for many other products too. So if you don't mind Apple invading your privacy, you should not complain about Meta, Google, your car, etc.
- ZeroTalent 1y agoLook into the app Little Snitch. It's fantastic! https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html I'm unaffiliated with the owners.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoSecond Little Snitch. > NOTE: Corporate IT departments no likee Little Snitch.
- dev_hugepages 1y agoDo you have a story to tell us?
- thesuitonym 1y agoI don't have a story but Little Snitch is the kind of tool most corporate users don't need, but that many malicious actors love to use. Sort of like running nmap on your computer, yeah there are legitimate reasons to do so, but you will get a call from IT if you try it.
- ZeroTalent 1y agointeresting. don't malicious actors use much more advanced tools than little snitch?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoIn the case of the company I worked for, they worried as much about insider threats, as they did, external ones. They didn’t like employees, exploring the network.
- thesuitonym 1y agoMalicious actors use every tool you can imagine, and many you can't.
- msgodel 1y agoShould push really be going through Apple on a laptop? I kind of understand it on a phone (although users should be able to switch push providers if they want to eg use open source software that apple won't allow) but on a Laptop there's no reason to not just have the application manage the toasts/sockets itself.
- yencabulator 1y agoOh it's much more than that. Lots of 3rd party software vendors making macOS-only apps use Apple's CloudKit for state sync, all that data is stored by Apple.