[workingon]

Regarding below comments, and Apple's desire to enter the ad business and still keeping data/not respecting privacy, that's definitely a bad thing, but I still am really happy Apple did this to Facebook/Zuck. Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users. It's entirely corrupt. If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world, instead of profiting off of catalyzing it's downfall like Meta.

I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

[ipaddr]

Apple kills many small businesses/apps unrelated to privacy but often wearing that shield as a defense. Why celebrate taking down another multinational when the reasons are self serving and creates bigger privacy issues?

[JKCalhoun]

If Apple's self-serving reasons are "because our users want it" then I am all for it.

That 2/3 of users opted out of being tracked suggests Facebook has no similar reasoning for their business model.

[benreesman]

There are plenty of legitimate gripes with the consumer Internet megacorps. All of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more have done user-hostile and privacy hostile things. I was just taking them to task for their bullshit about AI ethics on the big language models yesterday.

But as someone working on my own Internet hyperbole problem, I’ll gently suggest that rabid-sounding hyperbole is just going to turn off the zillion employees at those companies who are also HN users and might be able to do something about it.

“Third-party cookies” === “spying”, a bit of a reach in 2022. “Grandma” knows about cookies now. It’s not an absurd argument, but it’s a bit extreme.

FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

[GekkePrutser]

I don't agree. Third party cookies exist almost entirely for the purpose of spying.

SSO is an exception but a minor one

[rvz]

> FAANG is “catalyzing the downfall of the world”? We’re in “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” territory.

All the free software and privacy activists needed was Edward Snowden to leak the illegal harvesting and collection of user data done by the NSA and with Big Tech helping along quietly with the PRISM project.

Ever since they were all caught in the act, they are now screaming about privacy all of a sudden as they pretend to care about it whilst they waste resources and burn up the planet with their broken deep learning models in tens of thousands of data centers on user data only for surveillance.

Little to nothing has changed. Despite these regulations, Big Tech is still getting bigger and pushing for more surveillance and aiding the existence of another digital dystopia.

[pete_nic]

> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.

>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.

[pmontra]

As a long time DDG user, Google Search is better. I end up searching again on Google about half of the time I search for technical stuff (software) or for non English sites. I just feel DDG didn't understand what I want and Google usually does. I don't login on Google and use a Firefox extension to clear the cookies so Google might only rely on the search term, not my history, but who knows.

[tpetry]

Google is not a search product. Their revenue come from Adwords, which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users.

[remarkEon]

Breaking up Google and Meta would be a huge boon to all of us. Think of all the extremely intelligent and driven people who are being paid dump trucks of money to build internet surveillance or psychological manipulation technology at scale.

They could be working on so, so many more interesting and important problems.

[biztos]

I'm sure there are some extremely intelligent and driven people working on internet surveillance or psychological manipulation, but if the only reason they're doing it is for the dump-trucks of money then I have zero confidence they will go work on interesting and important problems should MetaGoo somehow tank.

They'll just go wherever the largest dump-trucks are offered. Because they already did that, and it made them relatively wealthy, and yet there they still are.

[colechristensen]

>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

Sell computers with chrome preinstalled with a good adblock extension.

[mlyle]

You can't, because the Chrome license is personal and non-assignable. If you enter into a contract with them to deploy them on computers, I assume this is precluded explicitly by the terms.

You could with Chromium, but that's problematic and annoying in minor ways. (Some of the things consumers value involve Google integrations).

[ipaddr]

Your chrome id still is used to link you and the sites you visit.

[barbacoa]

I someday hope to see pihole like dns filtering built into residential routers.

[account-5]

I still dream of a Firefox OS device in the vein of a Chromebook. I was gutted when Mozilla abandoned Firefox OS.

[irrational]

I thought google was changing chrome so that adblockers can’t work anymore on that browser?

[ksec]

That is exactly what is wrong. When Apple does it, it is all good. As if other business provides zero value to the world.

And to answer your last point. Apple are already doing it to Google. Apple collect $10+ Billion per year from Google just to be the default search engine. Squeezing Google left and right, partly forcing Google to increase the amount of Ads around the web.

[Gibbon1]

My thinking of late is we need to change the laws of incorporation to prevent product and service companies from making money off ads.

[smoldesu]

We could do the same to Google; it would require Apple working with the government, though, and adding more regulations is the last thing Apple wants. This is a shame, because we're never going to make lasting change by having private corporations do our battles for us. Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook. I don't care if you're the biggest company in the world, you still have to play by the rules.

> If you took the same ability away from Apple, they would be fine, because most of their business model is actually trying to provide something of value to the world

Sure, they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop. Bettering the world is just their nature!

Pragmatically, though, none of these companies will ever champion true privacy. What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM? Here on HN we love to white-knight for multi-trillion dollar companies and quibble over whitepapers, but everyone has lost. Privacy is unattainable. Security is feasible, but privacy? It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Windows or MacOS; you're not in control of your data. Period.

[JKCalhoun]

> Furthermore, we have no way of holding Apple accountable if they're doing the same thing as Facebook.

Not buy their products?

[astrange]

> What's the point of even arguing over this stuff when every one of these corporations is compliant in PRISM?

PRISM = subpoenas. It’s not an illegal spying program. You don’t want companies to answer subpoenas?

[mistrial9]

> they make money hand-over-fist by exploiting Uighur labor for your shiny metal laptop.

your case would be stronger if you don't overreach .. overall component assembly business is race-to-the-bottom for worker rights, in China now.. that ethnic cleansing you mention is horrible but not exactly the same thing, and intelligent readers may know that. From my point of view, it is the Tibetans to be concerned with, not Uighur. And that is possible a more potent insight .. that Apple knowingly profited from race-to-the-bottom worker conditions, orchestrated under a government responsible for Tibetan cultural genocide. But, it is not the Tibetans that did the assembly, nor to my knowledge the Uighur.

[soperj]

> provide something of value to the world

Just for a limited time when the purposely made their phones unusable through OS updates.

[Swizec]

Apple in my experience has a marvelous track record with this sort of thing.

I upgraded from an iPhone 4 to X because it worked fine for so long. This summer I updated my mom’s 8 year old Macbook Air to Monterey and it works great.

And I’m starting to think about upgrading my 2018 iPad only because of memory issues with 3rd party apps dumping context when multitasking.