Nah. I was with Apple for the better part of a decade; Apple care[sd] about user privacy only insofar as it gave them something else to bash Google about[1]
[1] Getting into a knock-down-drag-out with the new honcho overseeing CoreOS about us "doubling down on user privacy" was one of the last straws for me. Everybody in the audience was source-disclosed (and some of us had even read the relevant parts :), and the guy had the audacity to claim a certain thing was impossible when we knew that particular thing was not only possible but was being uploaded to the mothership ...
> Apple care[sd] about user privacy only insofar as it gave them something else to bash Google about
Apple have done a lot of work in relation to privacy, and I am struggling to think of times they have bashed Google in relation to that work. It’s rare for Apple to refer to competitors at all.
For instance, here’s Apple’s documentation on tracking prevention in WebKit:
This is clearly the result of privacy work spanning many years. I can’t think of a time Apple have bashed Google in relation to any of this functionality.
This goes for pretty much everything I can think of where Apple is clearly working on privacy-improving measures. If the only reason Apple works on privacy is to bash Google, where is all the Google bashing? Because I can see a lot of privacy work, but I can’t see a lot of Google bashing.
I should have made the scope of my comment more clear: the Google-bashing was internal.
I honestly could not care less what the marketing spin was; internally, we were being told things that we knew to be false.
I'm speaking specifically about the "absolute technical impossibility of providing certain information residing in the iDevice to anyone, even when the request was accompanied by a search warrant", which was the mantra circa 2014. The market differentiator was "we care about user privacy, in stark contrast with Google, who monetizes all data on their devices".
That was horseshit, as a specific security team regularly handled exactly those requests ... and heaven help you if you pointed that out in any discussion with management.
Big chunks of the 5.3 kernel source was definitely leaked to a select group of developers by a very disgruntled Crayon[1] during The Occupation[2]. Kuroi-san apparently is not part of that group.
Source: I saw the contents of that tarball, and it was authentic.
[1] Cray employee's self-applied moniker
[2] Crayons' description of the period following the acquisition by SGI.
Yep, absolutely true -- I worked on the project ("FDR / New Deal").
It was originally supposed to prevent a repeat of the Hon Hai Zhengzhou incident where a team of line workers mixed/matched parts from units that failed QC and sold the Frankensteined units on the grey market. (Massively oversimplified, but that's the general gist)
The resulting near-total inability to swap screens/buttons without knowing someone with FDR update access was seen as acceptable collateral damage.
If that project came my way, it would have been a hard no, go find someone else. You literally implemented the most public unfriendly feature I've seen in a long time. That's one of those cases where sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
While I understand we are all entitled to differently prioritizing ethical red lines, it saddens me whenever I see the public suffering for the sake of increased corporate profits.
...and it is only the company that gained anything. The extra parts on the market would likely have driven prices down, making the handsets less high dollar desirable theft targets. Instead; user servicibility plummeted, planned obsolescence ensured the path of least resistance was "buy another", and the accountants likely beamed at the improvement to the bottom line while the execs patted themselves on the back for a job well done securing money that otherwise "would have been left on the table".
It took the theft of phones from honest folks to make those 'extra parts' available in the past. I personally don't want these 'extra parts' on the market even if it ends up increases repair prices for everyone.
