In this context, normal people will believe the marketing and trust meta, and caveat emptor is a cop-out at best. I can sell you a basket of bread, and it’s privacy-preserving bread, but it will also punch you in the face if you don’t read every bit of the agreement. No one reads the agreement, and that’s what Meta runs on, plus skirting the law in every way they can possibly get away with.
In this context, Apple provided a feature that gives applications Full Disk Access. The journalist enabled it, and then had their face eaten by leopards after ignoring the warning.
Take Meta out of the equation here; any agent with FDA can do the exact same thing. Claude, Codex, DeepSeek, any of them. This is why Apple's response is a fix to their own software. The fix is a mea-culpa, Apple would not have to patch their OS if it was behaving exactly the way they wanted it to. Apple and the journalist made the biggest mistakes here.
Meta is a godawful company that should be regulated into the dirt until Zuck is left with nothing. Guess what? They're not to blame in this scenario, and your rabid attacks on lapcat (who is a reputable and generally impartial macOS developer) is unnecessarily hostile towards a perfectly normal observation. This brand of comment is so misleading, low-effort and harmful to good-faith discussion that I'm tempted to flag this whole thread for being founded on a misunderstanding. Your response has contributed to the derailing of this conversation by tribalist "Apple vs Meta" pundits who are drowning out a well-known and respected expert that has technically-salient architectural details to share. HN cannot foster intellectual gratification under these conditions.
> Caveat emptor. Don’t be an idiot. Grow up. Make informed decisions regarding your use of these products and take responsibility for those decisions.
Feigned outrage, indeed. I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that Meta has been consistently predatory, reckless, and creepy with user data before, and that this is a very aggressive expansion of that.
The old facebook booster retort of "if you don't like it, don't use it, take responsibility" or whatever is nonsense. You're in their system whether you use their product or not. Even if you somehow avoid their pervasive web-wide tracking, a single contact you know installing this thing and gobbling up all your correspondence with them can compromise your privacy choices, and that's well beyond your control, unless you seriously suggest I audit every single one of my contact's devices and browbeat them into using the privacy choices I prefer.
> "if you don't like it, don't use it, take responsibility" or whatever is nonsense.
Why? I don't use Meta products, and my life isn't substantially impacted or controlled by them. Explain to me why I need to lobby my OS developers to reign-in Meta, from my perspective. Why is my hands-off approach insufficient for teaching adults to make intelligent decisions?
Facebook is unquestionably awful, but that's a regulatory issue. 90% of the people chiming-in with Facebook outrage aren't using Meta products; they are literally feigning surprise and outrage as someone that clearly knows better. Oftentimes, they oppose any regulation that would force Meta to reconcile their damages because it would also jeopardize other abusive monopolies like the App Store that they love to defend. So where does the buck actually stop? Does it ever?
HN has done this for years. Years and years and years. "Meta is horrible! Stop them!" -> "New Meta product has ~10-100 million MAU" -> "We need private enterprises to limit Meta!" -> Stagnant status-quo where exploitation is rewarded. Things got this bad because of the pugilist, tribal attitudes that dominated tech discussions and steered people away from common-sense regulatory measures.
My assumption is you clearly don't have vulnerable or elderly people in your life? I'm not as concerned about my ability to navigate these waters as I am about the people I care about.
Yesterday everyone was all worked up about OpenAI generating an image with a signature on it.
Caveat emptor. Don’t be an idiot. Grow up. Make informed decisions regarding your use of these products and take responsibility for those decisions.