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Put simply: I’ve talked to Apple engineers. Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. Everyone made fun of them for protecting them. This is exac
by tylerchilds 5mo ago
Put simply:
I’ve talked to Apple engineers.
Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Everyone made fun of them for protecting them.
This is exactly the opposite of that, where Mark is throwing you and your children under the bus again because he’s unoriginal and doesn’t know how to make money any other way than by getting all up in your business, statistically.
- cyanydeez 5mo agothats a generous view. The dystopian fascist view is he's aligning with the surveillance state's interests and instagram is seen as a breeding ground for anti-american-american activities.
- nothinkjustai 5mo agoApple feels like the only big tech company that remotely cares about its users. Thank god they make the best computer and OS too. I’m sure this will not be a popular take on HN however.
- dwedge 5mo agoAndroid was originally enticing because of iOS locking everything down and controlling the ecosystem
- esafak 5mo agoAndroid was designed to prevent Windows from dominating mobile: I literally helped create Android to prevent Microsoft from controlling the phone the way they did the PC - stifling innovation. So it's always funny for me to hear Gates whine about losing mobile to Android. — Rich Miner (https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765 https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765)
- qmr 5mo agoContinue reading with a Verge subscription
- throw1234567891 5mo ago“But I want my freedom, I want to install whatever I want, bad Apple for locking down my devices away from me.” They stay rather secure because of all these measures. But they’ll get dismantled, too. Because idiots push idiots in power to weaken Apple’s stance. Useful idiots is the right term.
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo agoBeing in a prison cell is a great way to avoid traffic accidents, I agree.
- throw1234567891 5mo agoIt’s people like you who go in the dark forest because “the prison is tight”, get mugged, then complain that the sheriff doesn’t operate there. Call it a prison cell, or a fortified city. Whatever, dude…
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo agoNah, I would never be using an Apple product to begin with because I'm not a magpie to be wooed by a shiny nickel in the mud.
- throw1234567891 5mo agoWhat you’re saying is that regardless of what Apple does, you’re not going to use it anyway. Why would anyone care about your opinion.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- computably 5mo ago"Best" is subjective. But "caring about their users"? Their response to RtR alone shows they care about their margins more than their users.
- michaelt 5mo agoApple care about their users like a farmer cares about a herd of dairy cows. Whereas Microsoft and Google care about their users like a farmer cares about a herd of pigs.
- iamtedd 5mo agoI can tell you don't actually know what goes on on a dairy farm.
- overfeed 5mo agoIf you charitable (like you should be), then a reasonable assumption is that they probably know what happens on a dairy farm, and that's actually their point.
- desecratedbody 5mo ago[dead]
- drfloyd51 5mo agoHam and eggs. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.
- jesterson 5mo ago> I’m sure this will not be a popular take on HN however. Precisely because it's your feelings, not objective observation. No public company would care of their users, even remotely. Indeed, during Jobs time it actually worked that way, but that time is long gone. The OS is not nearly the best, just like laptops.
- nothinkjustai 5mo agoNothing anyone says about Apple here is based on “objective observation” so idk what your point is. Your entire comment is also just your feelings.
- Handy-Man 5mo agoThey were kinda forced to in the name of "think of the children". The New Mexico case that's been going on at the moment.
- al_borland 5mo agoI usually defend Siri, because I’m perfectly fine trading a little functionality for security. I prefer it that way.
- stego-tech 5mo agoSame. The fact they're shoving AI into it and expanding it to providers who don't have privacy as a guiding principle is a key reason I'm sitting on a 14 Pro still, and why I'm exploring local alternatives with Home Assistant. Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.
- kypen 5mo agoHome Assistant is indeed quite nice and relatively simple to set up with the Docker images provided by the team. Device setup on iOS was a little inconsistent, but has been rock solid for over a year. Check out Homebridge as well. I run both.
- stego-tech 5mo agoI ought to take a break from my Docker Compose work and get back to migrating off Homekit and into Home Assistant. The Home Assistant Yellow has been a real champ thus far, and once it’s set I can then tie the Unfolded Circle 3 into it for better control.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoWhat value do you get out of Home Assistant you don't from HomeBridge? I use HomeBridge for a few devices, my Windmill AC, some Govee lights, and previously my Ikea smart lights (Tradfri, but now Dirigera supports HomeKit).
- amazingamazing 5mo agoIm curious what the threat model is that you're protecting against
- dyauspitr 5mo agoPrivacy is the reason I’m still on team Apple.
- bramhaag 5mo agoApple's response to the UK gov asking to see users' iCloud data says enough about where their priorities lie [1]. They do something far worse in China [2]. Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-store-icloud-keys-in-china-raising-human-rights-fears-idUSKCN1G805Z/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
- thephyber 5mo agoYour links say that Apple complies with the laws of major countries. Which companies don’t do that?
- bramhaag 5mo agoSignal is one example. Their values are simply not compatible with what the Chinese government wants (local data storage, key access, etc.). Instead of complying and putting their users' privacy at risk, they accepted the ban. Google, out of all companies, also decided to partially walk away from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns [1]. Nobody is forcing Apple to do business in China, or the UK. They actively choose to do so, and because of that also put themselves in a position where they have to comply with these laws, presumably because it makes them more money. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html
- mfru 5mo agoGoogle also chooses to be a US company even thought the US is supporting a genocide and is doing an illegal war against a foreign country (again) You could argue Signal is the most "moral" here, but even then they don't really allow self-hosted backends and refuse to open-source their setup
- alex1138 5mo agoDo you know what Zuckerberg said in an interview? I think it was to Lex Fridman but I could be wrong "Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years" Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials
- thephyber 5mo agoI’m less impressed with Zuck every time I hear something new about him. Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years. In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.
- Barbing 5mo agoAnything groundbreaking in advertising? Meta ad tools are pretty granular. (Looking for anything here!)
- shimman 5mo agoProfiting off of a genocide is a first in the social media world, pretty ground breaking. Especially when you find out that workers and management knew about it as it was on-going but did nothing in response. Truly such innovative people, surely they deserve all the money and non of the responsibility. It is a meritocracy after all.
- thephyber 5mo agoFacebook “allowed” Cambridge-Analytica to Hoover up a massive amount of psychometric data on US voters before the 2016 election (ins care quotes because they “allowed” it in the sense they prevented it by policy but did nothing significant to deter the data collection at scale). I would argue that FB’s bigger wins have been in being the first app / website to get perhaps 50% of the world population using it, and also the Herculean effort it took to moderate that’s volume of content (whether or not you agree that moderation was the right choice or successful).
- zer0zzz 5mo agoPeople are bozos for wanting more from a glorified egg timer. I like Siri myself.
- yalok 5mo agobuilding new features on top of E2EE is genuinely hard, and I've seen many companies struggle to keep innovating while staying strictly E2EE. Having seen multiple leading messaging/VoIP stacks from inside, the amount of engineering spent to work around various limitations of E2EE in real prod scenarios is insane, and even for simple every-day-use features metrics don't compare to the metrics of the same feature running without E2EE.
- garciasn 5mo agoThen a more reasonable response is: “we cannot as effectively monetize all of the data in our advertising platform disguised as another tool entirely unless we disable E2EE and we need to be able to allow not only ourselves but others to invade your privacy even more than we already do because it’s technologically difficult to do so when we encrypt your communications.”
- yalok 5mo agoit doesn't necessarily have to be tied to monetization & privacy directly. It may just be that ROI doesn't make sense: very few user out there truly care about (or even understand) E2EE, for quite some users it creates an inconvenience & support incidents (harder to move from device to device, forgot your passphrase - lost your history, new joiners to a group chat don't see previous history, etc), it requires a significant additional engineering effort to just maintain it, many new features get shipped much slower because of it...
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 5mo agoIt doesn't have to be, but that's not really an argument for claiming it isn't. Considering how deeply embedded privacy violation is in Meta's corporate DNA, is there any reason other than hilariously naïve and inexplicably charitable, hypothetical speculation to believe this is not motivated by more privacy violation for profit, just like literally every single thing Meta has done in the entire history of the company? No? Didn't think so.
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- wolvoleo 5mo agoI don't buy that. They could have done more with it despite the constraints. There's been a big lack of interest from Apple for a long time. Just like every few years they introduce a completely new Mac Pro with all the fanfare and then completely lose interest and let it wither and die for 5 years.
- FireBeyond 5mo ago> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. Garbage. That's some good spin, though. Siri is a turd in a punch bowl for many reasons that have nothing to do with privacy. "Siri, do X thing" "Done" "Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean" Siri is connected to my Apple HomeKit. "Siri, turn off my Kitchen Lights" "I don't know what lights you mean." Siri feels like it never evolved past a proof of concept.
- Barbing 5mo ago> "Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean" It’s funny. Even a team of interns could’ve mapped more synonyms, right? & Apple Intelligence, when it uses ChatGPT, it wouldn’t be quite as horrible if Apple had paid for better tokens instead of quantizing into oblivion… I think. Two savings for Apple resulting in subpar experiences.
- crazygringo 5mo ago> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. That makes zero sense. The problem with Siri is... Siri. The interface itself. Zero of my complaints around Siri have to do with it not being able to access my private data. They're entirely about it not understanding my request in the first place or lacking a basic capability.
- tylerchilds 5mo agoIt’s not about your data. It’s about the sum of all expression being able to be reflected back to you in such a way that Dawkins believes he’s met intelligent life. Facebook and Google just slurped up their data centers, while Apple was encrypted.
- yangm97 5mo agoSiri fell behind because the bean counters at Cupertino didn’t want to spend on it, this is well documented and has nothing to do with privacy.
- sotix 5mo agoInteresting. I've talked with engineers at Apple that worked directly on the Siri team who made no such claim and said it largely a cultural issue.
- _boffin_ 5mo ago> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. Uhh. What the heck are you talking about? I’m calling straight bs on this unless presented rational. Siri has access to knowledge.db or whatever it is, which is the centralized hub for pretty much all things. Siri phones home every request made via Siri. I think you got sold snake oil