this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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There’s legitimate criticism to be made for Apple, but this is something I really appreciate about them.
Walled garden aside, I think they do care about privacy and security.
It's their brand. And I'm glad it is. It's something Samsung can't copy (I presume because of the Google backbone) or attack.
(Written on a Samsung phone btw.)
Edit. I should probably add why it's good even when I'm not in their ecosystem. It raises the bar for competition and shows that privacy adds value.
I don’t know if they actually care, but I think they figured privacy was a great niche to jump in when they started losing more and more market share to android
It's a brilliant move for Apple because Google can't play that game.
Google is fundamentally an advertising company. They materially benefit from user data in providing a more valuable service to advertisers. If Google takes a strong stance on privacy, it could disadvantage the primary business.
Definitely a differentiator
Yup. They have had issues (think CSAM scandal), but they’re slowly earning back my trust. I’m still a bit wary, but for big tech they have a pretty good track record.
People like you that think that was a "scandal" are half the problem though.
What they were doing with the on-device CSAM scanning as part of the upload to iCloud only was actually good for your privacy. It enabled them to comply with any current and future CSAM laws while protecting your privacy by doing the scanning on your device. It meant that they could then add E2E encryption to iCloud (and then iMessage as well) while still complying with CSAM laws. The alternative - and what everyone else does including google, microsoft, imgur, dropbox, etc - is doing the CSAM scanning in the cloud after you've uploaded it completely insecurely, requiring the data to be stored unencrypted and visible to those companies (and the government).
Doing it on device should have been applauded, but it was attacked by people that didn't understand how it's actually better for them. There was so much misinformation thrown around - that it would scan all of your photos and files as soon as they were created and then instantly report to the police if you took a photo of your infant in the bath, for example, or that it would be used by governments to identify people who have memes saved that they don't like, which is absurd because that's not how the CSAM databases work.
Apples proposed CSAM scanning was literally the best for privacy in the entire industry, and people created such an outrage over it that they basically went "oh well, we'll just do what everyone else is doing which is far more insecure and worse for privacy" and everyone congratulated themselves lol
You make a good point. I guess the outrage was more about scanning at all, though I suppose that’s not on Apple.