I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys here. I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom and worked to push open content and social media.
I started a social data search platform named Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which is basically a petabyte-scale content indexing engine.
We provide API feeds to search engines and social media analytics companies needing bulk data but don't want to have to build a crawler.
For the last 5 years we've had major problems with customers coming to us asking for data which we felt was unethical (at best).
We actually had Saudi Arabia approach us... It was clear that they were intending to something pretty evil with the data.
Their RFP questions were a bit frightening:
- can you track people by religion?
- can you give us their email address?
- can you provide their address?
- can your provide their ethnicity?
- can you provide their social connections?
We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques.
We just can't compete with data at that type of fidelity.
If you're a researcher and you want to access bulk data for combating this type of non-sense WE WILL PROVIDE DATA AT COST. We can provide up to 1PB of data but for now we have to charge for the shipping and handling of that data. We're reaching out to some other companies like Google and also the Internet Archive to see if we can provide more cost effective solutions.
I'm working on more tools to give the power back to the users.
Polar (https://getpolarized.io/) is a web browser which allows people to control their own data. The idea is that I can keep a local repository of data and eventually build our own cloud platform based on open systems like IPFS and encrypt the data using group encryption.
Disclaimer: I use Apple products, and trust them slightly more than anything Google/FaceBook/startups because they don't have a business front selling my data to advertisement companies or 3rd party miners(as much as I know of).
But, I'm baffled by this PR as if they are the privacy messiah. Didn't they just sellout their Chinese users icloud data to the Chinese government?
Yeah. "It's the law, and Apple has to obey the law" is an argument, but here is a company that is willing to compromise their user's privacy in order to be able to sell phones in China. So, if US govt finds a way to say "it's the law" to reveal user data, I'm sure they'll bend over. This grand stand in media is just sickening and theatric.
I like Tim Cook, I think his heart is in the right place and as much as a corporation can, Apple generally does the right thing.
I was having lunch with several lawyers at my company a few weeks ago. One of them was talking strongly about quality devices and Apple’s strong privacy stance. He literally said that we as a society should be grateful for having Apple.
It would be interesting if there were a civil penalty accessible to individuals if their personal data was divulged by someone to collected it. Lets say that it was $1,000 to $10,000. And that individuals need only file a simple form with the appropriate agency naming the company, identifying themselves, and the information divulged and get paid. The amount would vary based on how detailed the information was, more detail more penalty.
So someone like Equifax would be on the hook for $1.4T in civil penalties for losing the data on 143 million customers. That would have effectively put them out of business.
If you set up such a system, then it is very easy for engineering in an organization to explain why they need to invest in the security safeguards they need, and it is very hard for product managers to argue for collecting even more detailed information. All because you have created an existential threat to the company if they screw up.
It would be interesting if there were a civil penalty accessible to individuals if their personal data was divulged by someone to collected it
If you think the business community dislikes taxes, just wait until a law is proposed that gives people a private right of action against companies that leak their data. I don't think the term "white hot" would suffice.
It's sad how the introduction of a new class of devices "smartphones" brought along with it a surveillance software platform in the form of Android. Where it is clear that the only incentive for google to develop it is exfiltration of as much personal data as they can. In contrast in the case of Apple you have a customer relationship with the company that sold you the device and they have an incentive to keep you as a customer without having a need to extract as much advertisement revenue as they can.
I do get your point and agree but most users are uneducated and will most likely have problems with DuckDuckGo and be confused to what happened to their Google and why is it deleted. So I guess it’s another side to consider. That’s no excuse thou. Apple should at least ask the question in the onboarding.
The only problem is that Apple is the Mercedes of mobile devices. We really need a Honda and Kia version, a more affordable device that doesn’t track you.
Apple is never going to give up their premium position.
why not just buy an older device? bought a brand new iPhone se as soon as the new iphones x maxx was announced. mobile phone development as plateaued imo, there is nothing out there you really need unless you're fooling yourself.
photos - I bought a nice mirrorless with the money I saved.
apps - se runs everything tolerably fast except for snapchat and Instagram, which I've decided to cut down on anyways.comparison is the thief of joy and all the new social media apps promote comparison as the primary feature.
games - bought a Nintendo switch and it has fortnite as well.
all told 300+400+300 = 1000 which is STILL lower than the cost of the iPhone x max
That's exactly the problem I have. I don't want the unblockable ads and spying but I need my phone to be some cheap thing I don't have to respect or worry about. Once I started buying $150 phones every 2-3 years, I realised how much I need a device that I don't lose any sleep over it getting beaten to death and possibly replaced prematurely.
Not really. They own like 50% of the market. They position like 1960 GM. The $1,500 iPhone is the aspirational thing that everyone talks about. If you have money, you buy the iPhone Xs (ie the Cadillac), if you want to look "better", buy the Xr (Buick), if you don't care, you buy the iPhone 7 (the Chevy). There is almost nothing that the $1,500 phone does that the $1 phone does not.
The cheapo androids are more like the Yugo of mobile devices, and the nicer Androids basically cost the same or a little more. iPhone 7 is $1 on many promo deals.
If you go to companies with compliance requirements, iPhone owns the market, and is by far the cheapest solution. One of my "side hustles" in a very large org was managing about 40k iOS devices and 400 android devices... it basically cost about $9/year to manage, including staff. Staffing was basically 40-60% of two IT guys and half of 3 interns. If we broke the cost down further, the Androids would have been significantly more expensive, as additional 3rd party software was required as well as many more man-hours.
The iPhone is magic in that way, with sufficient scale, you deliver almost magical capability to your whole company, including network connectivity, for less than the run cost of a PC. And it costs something like 80% less to manage than a PC. If you look at companies in industries like field service, iPhones are almost a profit center.
It seems extremely hard to achieve that though. Creating a new smartphone hardware is very difficult and expensive. Creating a new smartphone OS and ecosystem is probably even harder. In order to have a proper "libre" smartphone you'd need to basically do both things. If behemoths like Microsoft couldn't pull it off I'm not sure how a newcomer could.
I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could either boot Android or your privacy-respecting OS, this way you could still get the mainstream sales with Android and you'd target the niche users who value their privacy with your custom system. Still seems very difficult to achieve, if you want your phone to be cheap you need to target a high sale volume to dilute the cost of your R&D.
I think the big problem is that smartphones never really had an healthy open source ecosystem going because it was all about closed hardware and locked bootloaders. Without a decent open source stack available it's hard to bootstrap a new system. And even if you did manage to do it you'd still need to convince people to port their apps to it (because not having Whatsapp or Instagram is going to be a deal breaker for many).
I imagine part of the reason they can afford to be pro-privacy is that they make enough money on actual sales to matter. If your margins are how, you will start looking for other ways to generate revenue.
I wonder if they could make a whole new company/brand that’s competes at the low end. If it ran iOS though, would that be enough to cannibalize too many iPhone users than would be acceptable?
Wondering if they could accomplish the same thing many car brands do i.e. Honda <> Acura
Just buy an Android device and opt out of all the tracking?
People behave as if this is impossible, but the options are all right there in the settings. There are a few places you lose some features but not super significant ones, and mostly those are because the tracking is intrinsically involved in the functions of the app.
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ....
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
If anyone is interested in watching the Keynote speech for themselves and form your own opinions, it can be watched on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVhOLkIs20A
Warning, Google will be tracking that you watch this speech :P
I wish I could separate his position from Apple's marketing stance. Unfortunately here he seems to use such hyperbolic language that it puts me on the side of "this is marketing". It seems very hard to separate cause and effect (is Apple's market strategy because of his beliefs on privacy, or is it the other way around?). But this kind of tilts me towards the latter.
Apple's market strategy was already primed towards a privacy-focused stance, since their profit center is selling physical devices. Thus, when privacy becomes a Big Deal in the world, Tim doesn't have to push hard to get Apple to line up with his beliefs. If Apple had been an advertising-focused company before Snowden, I doubt we'd be seeing as hard a push as they're giving right now.
Sometimes the stars align. Clearly Apple is in a good position to take this stance because they don't have a lot to lose if stronger privacy protecting regulations are enacted while their competitors, especially Google, would take a significant hit.
That being said I can totally believe that he genuinely believes what he says. Actually I'd wager that most tech people, including at Google and Facebook, see that we're having a problem with "big data" and the compulsive profiling of their users. The potential for abuse is tremendous.
Regardless of ulterior motives I think we should rejoice, having a behemoth like Apple taking such a clear stance on this issue could generate enough momentum to have an actual change in mentalities.
This is pretty much a textbook example of an attempt at regulatory capture, though more explicitly aimed at hurting competition than normal.[0] It's hard to take Apple as sincerely looking out for the best interests of consumers given their stance against repairs.
I think that it's ironic that Techcrunch make it so hard to read the article without agreeing to surveillance when they could just look at the Do Not Track headers.
I have owned couple of google phones (Nexus and Pixel). Today for the first time ever I am considering buying an iPhone. I would pay premium for privacy on Google devices if they make it available. And we now know what the price is - $40 in EU. Just sell it like this Google.
have owned couple of google phones (Nexus and Pixel). Today for the first time ever I am considering buying an iPhone
I was a BlackBerry die-hard until they switched to Android. A privacy-focused phone using a Google OS, what a joke. Switched to iPhone and it’s pretty good, only thing I miss is the real keyboard.
Good to see. Also nice to watch Facebook and Twitter and Youtube employees being called out for what they have enabled.
If you are smart enough to get a job anywhere, why even work to keep these toxic machines propped up? Time to bail before things get worse. Or read a book about the decline of Yahoo.
Cook isn't arguing that companies should not be allowed to have access to data. He's arguing that there should be laws in place to prevent misuse and abuses of that data.
There's nothing inherently wrong with agreeing to give a company access to your data. But it's absolutely wrong that once you've handed your data over, that company can do whatever it wants with it, with no restrictions, as if they own it.
I believe the "hey Siri" wake up works locally. For the rest that seems complicated as many of the questions you ask Siri requires Siri to fetch something online to find the response
I originally took this opportunity to critique the idea that Cook can stand to take a strong stance on privacy because their business model relies on selling an actual product and said product can only be affordable if you leverage cheap labor (and given historical context: very questionable working conditions).
However, for the sake of maintaining consistency with the article and staying relevant I have revised this post.
Tim Cook is there to give a speech at a Privacy conference. I thought his comments were consistent with how Apple has been presenting itself over the last years. This gives me some confidence that Cook will continue to lead and push for stronger privacy laws while fighting against politicians who look to weaken encryption
• allow per-app VPN via Apple Configurator, without enterprise MDM
• once the above two are available, we can use Tor, IDS, DPI or pihole on a per-application basis, to reduce data harvesting
• bonus1: allow the open-source iOS MDM community OR the iOS Shortcuts community to make it easy for novice users to have one-click install of "privacy-plus configurations"
• bonus2: provide open-source code for on-device, silicon-enabled voice recognition using Neural Engine. In the meantime, allow anonymous (no iCloud login) use of Siri via Tor on a per-application basis
I hope Google will at least analyze the idea of privacy, analyze what data they collect and if all of it needs to be collected or kept, when someone suggests let's collect everything there(and in other companies) should be some debate there before is implemented.
Before you consider Apple as your next device provider, remember that they right now are completely shutting down third party repairs of their devices.
Also Apple's own "repair method" is to tell you that it's broken, without so much as opening the case and just replacing any component that seems to act up, costing you up to the device's original price in repair fees.
That's very good. The more high-profile people speak up against what's happening, the more the general public realizes what's really going on. Frankly, most non-technical users have no idea how they're profiled and what the real and potential dangers are.
You know what's funny? We reached a point where 100% private conversation between two endpoints is finally possible, without the dependence on any third party (be it the Post Office, GSM operators,, Google, Apple, or anyone else). That's a huge step for communication privacy. And yet, most people choose the other way, they prefer to share their most intimate details with Facebook via Messenger and WhatsApp, with Google via Gmail, with Microsoft via Skype... Mostly because they're unaware of how things work and that other, more secure ways are available. So kudos to Cook for helping that cause just a bit.
Why doesn't he put the the money where his mouth is? I haven't seen Apple making any attempts to create funding model for publishers, even though the success of their products depends on the wide availability of free content.
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
I started a social data search platform named Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which is basically a petabyte-scale content indexing engine.
We provide API feeds to search engines and social media analytics companies needing bulk data but don't want to have to build a crawler.
For the last 5 years we've had major problems with customers coming to us asking for data which we felt was unethical (at best).
We actually had Saudi Arabia approach us... It was clear that they were intending to something pretty evil with the data.
Their RFP questions were a bit frightening:
- can you track people by religion?
- can you give us their email address?
- can you provide their address?
- can your provide their ethnicity?
- can you provide their social connections?
We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques.
We just can't compete with data at that type of fidelity.
If you're a researcher and you want to access bulk data for combating this type of non-sense WE WILL PROVIDE DATA AT COST. We can provide up to 1PB of data but for now we have to charge for the shipping and handling of that data. We're reaching out to some other companies like Google and also the Internet Archive to see if we can provide more cost effective solutions.
I'm working on more tools to give the power back to the users.
Polar (https://getpolarized.io/) is a web browser which allows people to control their own data. The idea is that I can keep a local repository of data and eventually build our own cloud platform based on open systems like IPFS and encrypt the data using group encryption.
[+] [-] reacharavindh|7 years ago|reply
But, I'm baffled by this PR as if they are the privacy messiah. Didn't they just sellout their Chinese users icloud data to the Chinese government?
Yeah. "It's the law, and Apple has to obey the law" is an argument, but here is a company that is willing to compromise their user's privacy in order to be able to sell phones in China. So, if US govt finds a way to say "it's the law" to reveal user data, I'm sure they'll bend over. This grand stand in media is just sickening and theatric.
/rant.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|7 years ago|reply
I was having lunch with several lawyers at my company a few weeks ago. One of them was talking strongly about quality devices and Apple’s strong privacy stance. He literally said that we as a society should be grateful for having Apple.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
So someone like Equifax would be on the hook for $1.4T in civil penalties for losing the data on 143 million customers. That would have effectively put them out of business.
If you set up such a system, then it is very easy for engineering in an organization to explain why they need to invest in the security safeguards they need, and it is very hard for product managers to argue for collecting even more detailed information. All because you have created an existential threat to the company if they screw up.
[+] [-] rhizome|7 years ago|reply
If you think the business community dislikes taxes, just wait until a law is proposed that gives people a private right of action against companies that leak their data. I don't think the term "white hot" would suffice.
[+] [-] kodablah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbifold|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|7 years ago|reply
http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...
[+] [-] denzil_correa|7 years ago|reply
You can call it hypocrisy but it doesn't affect the validity of Tim Cook's argument [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
[+] [-] martimarkov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|7 years ago|reply
Given that the source on this is one guy at Goldman Sachs, I’d treat that number with some suspicion.
[+] [-] anonuser123456|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jason46|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orbifold|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ensorceled|7 years ago|reply
Apple is never going to give up their premium position.
[+] [-] kkarakk|7 years ago|reply
all told 300+400+300 = 1000 which is STILL lower than the cost of the iPhone x max
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
The cheapo androids are more like the Yugo of mobile devices, and the nicer Androids basically cost the same or a little more. iPhone 7 is $1 on many promo deals.
If you go to companies with compliance requirements, iPhone owns the market, and is by far the cheapest solution. One of my "side hustles" in a very large org was managing about 40k iOS devices and 400 android devices... it basically cost about $9/year to manage, including staff. Staffing was basically 40-60% of two IT guys and half of 3 interns. If we broke the cost down further, the Androids would have been significantly more expensive, as additional 3rd party software was required as well as many more man-hours.
The iPhone is magic in that way, with sufficient scale, you deliver almost magical capability to your whole company, including network connectivity, for less than the run cost of a PC. And it costs something like 80% less to manage than a PC. If you look at companies in industries like field service, iPhones are almost a profit center.
[+] [-] simias|7 years ago|reply
I suppose the best path would be to create a new phone that could either boot Android or your privacy-respecting OS, this way you could still get the mainstream sales with Android and you'd target the niche users who value their privacy with your custom system. Still seems very difficult to achieve, if you want your phone to be cheap you need to target a high sale volume to dilute the cost of your R&D.
I think the big problem is that smartphones never really had an healthy open source ecosystem going because it was all about closed hardware and locked bootloaders. Without a decent open source stack available it's hard to bootstrap a new system. And even if you did manage to do it you'd still need to convince people to port their apps to it (because not having Whatsapp or Instagram is going to be a deal breaker for many).
[+] [-] nerdponx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jp555|7 years ago|reply
Used iOS devices are the Kia version.
[+] [-] fetbaffe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylnew|7 years ago|reply
Wondering if they could accomplish the same thing many car brands do i.e. Honda <> Acura
[+] [-] zmmmmm|7 years ago|reply
People behave as if this is impossible, but the options are all right there in the settings. There are a few places you lose some features but not super significant ones, and mostly those are because the tracking is intrinsically involved in the functions of the app.
[+] [-] carlmr|7 years ago|reply
It would be stupid of them.
[+] [-] rfinney|7 years ago|reply
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. .... Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
[ source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres... ]
[+] [-] move-on-by|7 years ago|reply
Warning, Google will be tracking that you watch this speech :P
[+] [-] zmmmmm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oddevan|7 years ago|reply
Apple's market strategy was already primed towards a privacy-focused stance, since their profit center is selling physical devices. Thus, when privacy becomes a Big Deal in the world, Tim doesn't have to push hard to get Apple to line up with his beliefs. If Apple had been an advertising-focused company before Snowden, I doubt we'd be seeing as hard a push as they're giving right now.
[+] [-] simias|7 years ago|reply
That being said I can totally believe that he genuinely believes what he says. Actually I'd wager that most tech people, including at Google and Facebook, see that we're having a problem with "big data" and the compulsive profiling of their users. The potential for abuse is tremendous.
Regardless of ulterior motives I think we should rejoice, having a behemoth like Apple taking such a clear stance on this issue could generate enough momentum to have an actual change in mentalities.
[+] [-] nappy|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
[+] [-] Lio|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EastSmith|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
I was a BlackBerry die-hard until they switched to Android. A privacy-focused phone using a Google OS, what a joke. Switched to iPhone and it’s pretty good, only thing I miss is the real keyboard.
[+] [-] kopo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefounder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomelders|7 years ago|reply
There's nothing inherently wrong with agreeing to give a company access to your data. But it's absolutely wrong that once you've handed your data over, that company can do whatever it wants with it, with no restrictions, as if they own it.
[+] [-] nemo846|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EZ-E|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyxtom|7 years ago|reply
However, for the sake of maintaining consistency with the article and staying relevant I have revised this post.
Tim Cook is there to give a speech at a Privacy conference. I thought his comments were consistent with how Apple has been presenting itself over the last years. This gives me some confidence that Cook will continue to lead and push for stronger privacy laws while fighting against politicians who look to weaken encryption
[+] [-] walterbell|7 years ago|reply
• add VPN on/off to control center
• allow per-app VPN via Apple Configurator, without enterprise MDM
• once the above two are available, we can use Tor, IDS, DPI or pihole on a per-application basis, to reduce data harvesting
• bonus1: allow the open-source iOS MDM community OR the iOS Shortcuts community to make it easy for novice users to have one-click install of "privacy-plus configurations"
• bonus2: provide open-source code for on-device, silicon-enabled voice recognition using Neural Engine. In the meantime, allow anonymous (no iCloud login) use of Siri via Tor on a per-application basis
[+] [-] trashtester|7 years ago|reply
Second response: Was undermining Google the reason he held the speech in the first place?
[+] [-] blinky1456|7 years ago|reply
'Buy apple products, we care about your data. We will help protect it. Encrypt it. Not share it. And block others form trying to get your data'
But are Apple as benevolent as they say? Do you trust such a gigantic corporation? Are they colluding with governments instead of just advertisers?
[+] [-] simion314|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akuji1993|7 years ago|reply
Also Apple's own "repair method" is to tell you that it's broken, without so much as opening the case and just replacing any component that seems to act up, costing you up to the device's original price in repair fees.
[+] [-] jhabdas|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dvfjsdhgfv|7 years ago|reply
You know what's funny? We reached a point where 100% private conversation between two endpoints is finally possible, without the dependence on any third party (be it the Post Office, GSM operators,, Google, Apple, or anyone else). That's a huge step for communication privacy. And yet, most people choose the other way, they prefer to share their most intimate details with Facebook via Messenger and WhatsApp, with Google via Gmail, with Microsoft via Skype... Mostly because they're unaware of how things work and that other, more secure ways are available. So kudos to Cook for helping that cause just a bit.
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply