this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 498 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

This is the correct response. Either everyone has protection or no one has. Not that I'd trust apple anyway but by pulling the service your average person is likely to make some noise because they can feel the effect.

[–] [email protected] 107 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

I'm not even an Apple user but somehow I still feel like Apple is one of the very last companies where privacy and the security of your data is more worth than a dime.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

Nope, Apple sells your data just as much as Google does: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/apple-ad-revenues-skyrocket-amid-its-privacy-changes https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/22/23513061/apple-iphone-app-store-ads-privacy-antitrust#luMMel

While people noticed their new policies against 3rd party apps, that masked the fact that those policies carved out an exception for first party apps, meaning they collect (anonymous) data on you through Health, Journal, Music, etc. just like every other company. "Trusting them more" is simply a result of you and everyone else getting hit with their privacy ads recently.

Edit: "just like every other company" meant Google and Microsoft, i.e. the other big equivalent tech companies, my fault for not being specific.

[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While I’m all for calling out companies for abusing your privacy, your own links show that they don’t collect as much data as google. They could (and should) be better though.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nope apple is literally worse than hitler, spez, and elon musk confirmed. Tim apple fucked my wife in front of me.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago

You lucky sonofabitch. You got to witness the ol Apple Pie with your own two eyes.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Anonymous data is actually pretty different to the data everyone else collects, which literally has your name and picture

Apple’s data is useful for trends but it can’t be used to study who I am.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago

As much as Google? Likely not. Does their carefully curated pro-privacy image actually match their practices? Also likely not.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago

“Just as much as Google.” LMAO. We have an expert here.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I feel like wuth the amount of stuff done on device and not in the cloud with iPhones and other Apple products, saying that Apple sells just as much as Google is at the very least disingenuous…

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago

I think this is correct response not just in case of morality, but in case of technology. How can you guaranty privacy of a call if the recipient is from UK?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (5 children)

iMessage isn’t a big loss in the UK. FaceTime would be.

WhatsApp pulling out of the UK would have the biggest impact. Almost everyone uses it here.

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[–] [email protected] 161 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Walled garden aside, I think they do care about privacy and security.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's their brand. And I'm glad it is. It's something Samsung can't copy (I presume because of the Google backbone) or attack.

(Written on a Samsung phone btw.)

Edit. I should probably add why it's good even when I'm not in their ecosystem. It raises the bar for competition and shows that privacy adds value.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don’t know if they actually care, but I think they figured privacy was a great niche to jump in when they started losing more and more market share to android

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

The incumbent government is circling the drain and are, it seems, determined to leave a trail of destruction and burned bridges for their successors to repair.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That is how conservative parties work, yes.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

Then they can point how useless the government is and get back in power

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (7 children)

There are a lot of things to hate about Apple, but this I can get behind. Get people using 3rd party messaging apps too! Preferably ones with e2e encryption.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (4 children)

God damn bullshit always "for children and terrorists"

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Signal and WhatsApp have also said they'd likely leave the UK market if this bill is passed as it currently is.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Signal should still work there if people want to use it, and they don't block it with a Great British Firewall.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (8 children)

What?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Under Standard Data Protection photos, general drive storage and device back up are not end-to-end encrypted. Meaning that Apple has full access to reading and analyzing them.

Under Advanced Data Protection which is an opt-in feature available since iOS 16.2, you can have those files end-to-end encrypted.

End-to-end encryption makes the user responsible for keeping an encryption key safe, irreversibly losing their data if they lose the key. It's not practical for the general population. I would guess its use is in low single digit percent of apple customers.

And this feature came out in December 2022. A bit over half a year ago. Unless your friend's NDA was super short, I presume the conversation took place before it was released. Either your friend was bullshitting you under an NDA or he's an idiot.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Don't you know anything, Brits? Apple only strips security features for the Chinese government, you fools!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Haha yeah too right. UK government isn't authoritarian enough for apple to listen to

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The one good thing I can say about apple is that they at least push back against this kind of bullshit, even if they only do so for marketing.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (10 children)

The other side is that they'll also push back against good stuff for the consumer since everything they do is completely out of self interest.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (30 children)
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Those proposals will never be made law and acted upon.

It's infeasible nonsense to pander to the Daily Mail reading curtain-twitchers. They've had 13 years to try and do this. If they wanted to (and indeed if it was in any way possible), they'd have done it already.

It'll be just "Vote for us and we'll make your children safe from nonces and muzzies!" until the end of time.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Eh, I never thought the GOP would actually overturn abortion rights because it's such an effective red herring to get their base to keep voting against their best interests, but here we are.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I'll be damned if we'll have to thank the UK for getting RCS normalized.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This has nothing to do with RCS from what I read on the article. It looks like the UK wants to be able to tell companies to disable security features such as End to End Encryption so that they can view the messages.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

Rare Apple W.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Why don't politicians just fuck off?

Nothing they ever do about anything leads to an improvement.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agreed that they should definitely fuck off, but this will be pushed y the security services. A change of government won’t change the drive for this sort of bollocks.

“Oh but what about the criminals, terrorists and pedos?”

What about all the people that aren’t that who loose their privacy?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

“Oh but what about the criminals, terrorists and pedos?”

What about the Windsors?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Why can't the UK govt simply rent their spyware from Israel, like everyone else?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They had a different response to China though. Telling.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

NSA Access Only!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't believe I'm saying this but...good guy Apple?

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