Privacy

31957 readers

312 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why don’t you like Apple? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

217 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Real question. I would like to know what drives you to hate Apple? (In terms of privacy of course because in terms of price it’s another story).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t track things, because they do, but at least there’s no vendor garbage and you can go through the Settings and disable everything you don’t need, restrict Apps from running in the background etc.

Did you make a mistake here? You are describing an Android device. You can even remove apps entirely from a device with a tool like Universal Android Debloater, and Android allows alternative app stores so you don't need to rely on a heavily limited selection of proprietary apps.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That tools doesn’t always work, besides an iPhone comes clean out of the box. No constantly running spyware on the background, no Samsung/Xiaomi apps. Almost everything can be easily turned off under Settings unlike an Android where you’ll be forced into a 3rd party tool or a ROM like GrapheneOS if you want a clean experience.

When you buy an iPhone you’ll also have a guarantee that you won’t be installing malware, even with the new Alt Stores in Europe, all the apps are code-signed and require validation. You also are sure that your apps won’t be able to get system-wide access and run all over your data and battery like we see on Android.

Yes, the iPhone is less open but it provides a level of security, privacy and “cleanliness” out of the box that Android devices can’t just match. If you don’t have much time / interest / tech skills to mess around with a phone then the iPhone is the best phone you can buy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

an iPhone comes clean out of the box

How does it come "clean out of the box" when you literally just said it requires modifications to the settings to improve its privacy?

at least there’s no vendor garbage

Samsung and Xiaomi apps are vendor-specific and can be disabled, even without the use of UAD (which works fine, not sure why you're lying about that).

unlike an Android where you’ll be forced into a 3rd party tool or a ROM like GrapheneOS if you want a clean experience.

GrapheneOS is available as an option because Android has an open-source basis. Remind me which alternative privacy OS Apple allows third party developers to create for iPhone? Which iPhone did they allow users to install this imaginary privacy OS on?

You also are sure that your apps won’t be able to get system-wide access

Android applications have been sandboxed for several versions now.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 5 months ago

How does it come “clean out of the box” when you literally just said it requires modifications to the settings to improve its privacy?

iOS comes with reasonable privacy defaults and blocks things such as apps running in the background for long time. Going into the settings is the extra-mile that still easier than having to install a cleaner ROM or deal with 3rd party tools.

Samsung and Xiaomi apps are vendor-specific and can be disabled, even without the use of UAD (which works fine, not sure why you’re lying about that).

I'm not lying about anything here, you know as well as I do that many vendors don't allow you to remove all of their Apps and most install permanently running daemons that you can't remove without UAD or other methods.

Android applications have been sandboxed for several versions now.

Yet the sandboxing isn't even comparable. One key aspect of the iOS sandbox is that is not only restricts filesystem access but also executes applications with way less privileges than Android does.

To complement the sandbox iOS apps are forced to use Apple's APIs in order to access user data (eg. Contacts and Photos) which will apply strict restrictions such as allowing you to limit at a system level what photos an application may access. Since all apps are required to be summited to Apple for review (even on Alt Stores) they'll enforce the usage of their APIs making it way harder to bypass restrictions.

Comparatively, on Android, you can install applications from random sources that typically resort to hacks to get around the sandbox restrictions and access more than they should.