

Apple Boss Tim Cook Hits Out at Facebook and Google - SimplyUseless
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32991036

======
revscat
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9650289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9650289)

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blinkingled
My problem with this is that it is pure marketing play. Apple isn't doing
anything really great to enhance user privacy in absolutes - all they are
doing is having all your data and not letting anyone else benefit from it -
right now. Which is to say Apple still does benefit from your data in direct
or indirect ways.

They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X. And
Apple supporters' justification for that is well, Apple isn't a company whose
revenue and profits are mostly dependent on ads. But if you look at facts,
Apple wants to get a big pie of everything, not just hardware. And they go out
of their way to try and get it - book sales (ref: antitrust case), iAd, Maps,
Streaming Music - the list goes on and on.

Given this, how do you claim Apple won't use your recorded search queries or
music you listened to (Genius Recommendations) or location data or whatever
else they record and we don't yet know about - to increase their profits? They
sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first place.

Google is doing the same thing by showing you ads that may be of interest to
you, analyzing your Google Voicemails to increase their speech recognition
accuracy, making their maps data more robust by giving you the best Navigation
app for free, giving you useful reminders by looking at your email - they are
doing it now and in return they are providing you with great products you can
optionally use.

To claim that Google is doing something evil while Apple is not purely because
they make money on hardware is naive and too simplistic. (Case in point -
Microsoft made most of their money selling you boxed software - now a days
they want you to use their services and will provide you with a free upgrade
to Windows and free online Office suite down the line. They did not care about
your data before, but now they do!)

Fact is you can either place reasonable trust on Google or Apple and continue
to be part of the modern world or just drop all your devices, bank accounts,
cards, get a car from 1970s and move off the grid. As much as it sounds harsh
there isn't really such a thing as 100% privacy. Your data will always be
vulnerable to becoming public in various degrees and to various effects.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "Apple isn't doing anything really great to enhance user privacy in
absolutes - all they are doing is having all your data and not letting anyone
else benefit from it - right now."

1\. iMessage and FaceTime data is encrypted.

2\. Having my data and not letting anyone else benefit from it is 100x better
than what most tech companies are doing. Also they don't have 'all' my data.
They take what they need to improve my experience. Other companies hoover up
everything they can because they need it to sell.

>> "They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X."

To improve the spotlight user experience. They're not selling my data and I
can easily disable it.

>> "They sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first
place."

No. The data the collect is to improve the user experience. They have no need
to sell it - they're the biggest company on the planet.

>> "As much as it sounds harsh there isn't really such a thing as 100%
privacy."

There never has been but there is a big difference between what Apple offers
privacy wise and what Google or Facebook offer.

~~~
qazwse_
> they're the biggest company on the planet.

I agree with what you're saying, but this is just not true.

~~~
urda
I don't think you understand what what is being stated at all.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2014)

Apple is the biggest company on the planet, based on Market Capitalization,
which is the factor to determine the strongest companies out there.

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dude_abides
This would have sounded credible if Apple didn't have an iAds business that
mines user clicks and offers retargetting ads to paying customers.

Instead, now, this sounds like Microsoft's Scroogle campaign, where it accused
Google of doing all the things that Bing also did, but wasn't successful at
doing.

~~~
k-mcgrady
"One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd.
We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that
business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio
service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other
Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri,
iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and
you can always just opt out altogether."

[https://www.apple.com/privacy/](https://www.apple.com/privacy/)

~~~
dewitt
Google has a one-click opt-out as well:

[http://www.google.com/settings/ads](http://www.google.com/settings/ads)

I remain opted in, fwiw.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I know about that but that's simply an opt-out of interest based ads - they're
likely still collecting your data in case you enable the ads again.

~~~
dewitt
You might be also interested in
[https://myaccount.google.com](https://myaccount.google.com), which offers
full visibility and fine-grained control into everything in one place.

I wasn't personally involved in building it, but in my opinion it's really
impressive. I wish other companies would do the same.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Yeh I really like Google's account section. They also do a nice monthly email
report of your account activity.

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jonknee
It's a clever pivot by Tim Cook. He figured out that Apple is awful at selling
advertising and has turned this into a marketing feature.

Steve Jobs was very excited about advertising, remember him describing iAds as
a life changing experience that users would love? It completely failed, but
hey.

[https://youtu.be/KwVaILbTqS8?t=45m55s](https://youtu.be/KwVaILbTqS8?t=45m55s)

~~~
mrcwinn
It is true that it is failed, and that video looks silly in retrospect. But
it's also true that Apple has always had an entirely different business model
than, say, Google. This isn't a new "marketing feature." Apple has never
sought to make large sums of money by selling user data.

~~~
qwerty--
Repeating a lie that Google sells user data doesn't make it right. Stop
getting brainwashed by Apple and learn facts and learn how Google makes money.
It doesn't sell your personal data.

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josefresco
"Our business is based on selling products, not on having information about
you. You are not our product."

Pretty easy to say "we don't do this" when it's not even a _significant_ part
of your revenue stream.

Sort of like if Zuckerberg said "Our business is based on selling advertising,
not on selling premium, high markup shiny things".

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comrade1
If Apple is serious, the next step will be to open up the source for the
encryption parts of iMessage, FaceTime, etc with the ability to verify the
binaries, much like PGP used to do for their software. And also to verify the
keys being used in the messaging to make sure additional keys aren't being
added by apple.

~~~
therobot24
if only

~~~
comrade1
They don't have to open up the entire product - only the libraries for the
encryption part.

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minthd
In reality using Apple products reduces your privacy. How ?

If you use Google's products(and who doesn't use Google Search ? ) , Google
already knows plenty about you. And even if you don't use Google products,
Google knows plenty about you, since it's tracking software is installed in
large percentage of sites, etc.

And if you add machine learning on top of that , the amount that Google knows
about you is great - even if you use Apple's products.

In reality, by using Apple's products, you don't gain privacy , you lose
privacy - now two companies know a lot about you, instead of one.

Also this exposes your data for security bugs from both companies - thus
making it easier for third parties to go at it.

~~~
themgt
Really? All your documents, finances, photos, music, movies, messages, health
data, viewing patterns - might as well just give that to Google since they
already have your search queries? That doesn't make any sense.

~~~
minthd
You underestimate the amount of intelligence Google's search data + smart
machine learning can deduce about you. Remember how in the sherlock holmes
stories, sherlock can deduce huge amount about people , from tiny clues ?

How much do you think sherlock could deduce from Google searches - where
people usually bare their souls ,on ALL their issues, from the insignificant
to the critical?

Machine learning can, to some extent , be that sherlock, but if someone with
the right investigantional skills diggs through your search data - he can be
sherlock too.

And since Google does know all that about you, in most cases ,i think that
keeping the rest of the data won't be the thing that "saves" you - maybe with
the exception of your browsing patterns - but since Google has trackers in
most web sites - they already know a large part of your browsing patterns - so
you're quite defenseless there.

TL;DR - Google search knows a huge amount about you, And with that data,
sherlock holmes(or a decent investigator, or probably an AI) can know almost
everything on you!

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dharma1
Google's and Facebook's business models revolve around analysing user data and
using it for advertising. Apple makes money from hardware.

I think most users are aware of this, and in return for free or low cost
products they sign away part of their privacy.

The reason Google Photos offers unlimited storage, Gmail is free etc is they
can deep learn the f... out of their users to target their ads better.

Apple's privacy benefit is more of a side effect of their business model than
a principle they design their products based on.

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geekam
Is Apple not collecting any user data?

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headShrinker
I don't think the problem is so much collecting data, more what agreement the
company collecting the data has with third party corporations and governments.
Also, the fact that Apple includes full disk encryption for OS X, and encrypts
all communications on iOS storage and in transit with personal keys, is a
pretty good sign Apple is taking personal privacy seriously.

Facebook and Google haven't made such steps.

~~~
fpgeek
All the encryption in the world doesn't make any difference if it's easy to
steal your account.

Unlike Facebook or Google, Apple practically had to be shamed into fixing an
easily-gamed account reset process and adding two-factor authentication
support (and then took their own sweet time rolling it out across their
services) and had to be shamed again into adding rate-limiting on logins. Not
to mention their spotty track record on other security issues (e.g."goto
fail").

That doesn't mean that Apple hasn't done some things that are good for
personal privacy. But their broader track record makes it clear that Apple
only takes the appearance of personal privacy seriously. The reality, on the
other hand, easily takes a back seat to things like UI simplicity unless that
missing reality starts creating appearance problems.

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plg
see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9652298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9652298)

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nvk
So does that mean I will be able to use PGP natively on my iOS Mail app soon?

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devinegan
GPGtools (plugin) works nicely with native Mac mail
[https://gpgtools.org/](https://gpgtools.org/)

~~~
nvk
Yes, but what about iOS?

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btbuildem
Classic kettle and pot

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omegafail
Any links to the actual video?

