I'm confused as to why in this thread there's very little contrastive commentary on the different stance taken by Apple and Google about privacy.
Apple has made preserving user privacy a paramount goal, investing in research and technology to achieve it with minimal loss (however much it is) of (intelligent) functionality.
I find that a very strong point for the Cupertino based company.
Apple wants (or wanted?) control for themselves. DRM everything; control the products after sale; wall the garden. They became the thing they hated back in 1984.
After Snowden made Apples collaboration with the government economically untenable, Apple may now be willing to let users have control. They fought the FBI to protect privacy on a transparently political charade. They've built hardware and software key protection into the iPhone.
But this is a change, and maybe it's a lie, or maybe it will change back, or maybe they just won't succeed. I'm not rushing out to buy a Mac Book.
I am sorry, but you still believe apple is safe? I mean id love to believe in that there still is some part of tech left, that will not be the reason for reprisals.
Just one data point: After owning 4 nexus phones and being an 'android fanboy' I just bought an iPhone 7. I've decided that while still not that great, Apple's take on user privacy is much closer aligned with my own. I doubt many other people will make purchasing decisions based on that, but I still think Apple will be 'right' in the long run. I think that the resulting applications from all this data collection will never make it past the gimmicky stage for a lot of people. The general public may not care that much about privacy, but they also don't care that much about nearly everything google displayed. I think apple knows this and it's one of the reasons they can take their stance on privacy.
Well, the core of the different stance is just marketing.
Both Apple and Google comply with federal warrants, etc... That's obvious.
Neither of them have any intention of ever letting a 3rd party access user data, that should hopefully also be obvious. As in, neither company sells your information. It'd be a PR disaster, and in the case of Google it would be a massive loss of revenue as it would undermine their entire ad business.
So the only difference is what data they actually have access to, and it's not actually that different. The big difference is iMessage has end-to-end encryption by default so long as you're talking to another iMessage user. That's sorta it, though, and that gets largely neutered by the fact that the messages are then immediately backed up on iCloud anyway and that end-to-end encryption is lost in the process (otherwise you couldn't restore to a new device). Google now offers that, too, via allo's off-the-record, though. Everything else is pretty much the same between Apple & Google with regards to meaningful privacy.
Apple has made preserving user privacy a paramount goal, investing in research and technology to achieve it with minimal loss (however much it is) of (intelligent) functionality.
I find that a very strong point for the Cupertino based company.
(edited for legibility)
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