> To "airpods" example - I think that it is more about Apple making great product than Apple enforcing control.
You cannot set up a HomePod without an iCloud account (over and above an Apple ID).
You cannot install even free apps on iOS without an Apple ID, which requires a telephone number.
It is indeed about control and the acquisition of identified user behavior data. Apple has growth targets to hit and only so much can be done via hardware sales. Services revenue doesn't grow automatically without deep, intense data on a user's habits.
> Apple has control over your phone, your passwords, your photos, your music, your emails, your credit cards/payment methods.
This gets repetitive but: only if you let them. I’m not even sure you need an Apple ID to use an iPhone either, although you will for the App Store. Everything else is extra: iCloud, Apple Music, iCloud email, the Apple Wallet. Your Dropbox, Spotify, email host and credit cards don’t just fall into an abyss when you create an Apple ID.
Apple has what you give them. That’s true for every single one of their customers. Contrast that with Facebook that built shadow profiles before people even had accounts because the websites you visited and apps you used were relaying information back to them.
> Relying on Apple to do the right thing when they're sent a bunch of data which has some use to them, and to their users, if they keep it and run statistical analysis against it, is like relying on that handshake agreement to store some of your belonging in your kindly old neighbors shed.
No, it's relying on this being disaligned with their profit incentives. They've made a selling point of their products being privacy-focused, and actions that go against that directly impact the profitability of these products.
There have been several cases where data was mistakenly collected. Nobody's perfect! And in every one of those cases, they've gone above and beyond in explaining what went wrong and how they'll prevent those situations from occurring in the future. In several cases, they've even published white papers pushing forward the current state of the art on preserving privacy while collecting the minimal data necessary for services to function.
Apple is not Google and Facebook. The latter two have direct profit incentive to maximize data collection and analysis of you, personally. Apple wants to sell you consumer devices, and—outside of specific counterexamples like Siri—collecting your data rarely aligns with those profit incentives.
> I always feel like the user is grabbed by the balls when it comes to device manufactures trying to force you to give them your data rather than hand it over to someone else, just because they know the user can’t do anything about it really.
This isn't a manufacturer problem, it's an Apple problem. Lack of choice is baked into their design, which is uncontroversial among both proponents and detractors; the former would (reasonably) say that there are tradeoffs that are the other side of the coin to constraining the user so heavily.
> people like that apple controls your iphone, and wouldn't buy one if the owner controlled it.
My guess is that this applies to about as many people as the opposite “wants to control their device” stance. Which is to say approximately nobody. Most users probably don’t think about these things much if at all. They want a smartphone that runs the expected smartphone apps and has the expected smartphone features, and do not care whether or not some nerd can install and run some apps they’ve never heard of on his own device.
I imagine, though, that most people would have an opinion one way or the other about phones snitching on their owners.
I find that hard to believe when so many of their devices' functionality depends on you sending data over to them. Unless you go out of your way to make sure you're blocking all your devices from phoning home or sending any data over to Apple, then any supposed privacy benefit becomes a lie.
Either you're the only owner of your data or your data is not, by definition, private to you.
>> "The user controls the program or the program controls the user" is a false dichotomy to people who spend most of their time in the real world.
It is not a false dichotomy: Apple controls who gets to use iPhones and what they get to do on iPhones.
Can someone use an iPhone without an Apple account? If Apple were to lock or ban a user's Apple account, what could the user do about it?
Can someone run arbitrary software of their choice on an iPhone?
>> You can accept that Apple's incentives don't align perfectly with yours while being comfortable that they align enough that Apple will provide you with the service you're looking for.
Yes, but for how long and under what conditions? How willing are people to change when they are locked-in to the Apple ecosystem?
> Apple devices might not be precisely the smartest purchase if the concept of your hardware is important to you.
Maybe a handful of HN users are aware of that, but the majority of users think that their property belongs to them.
It also goes against what Apple marketing says about privacy and your data. I wouldn't fault most consumers for not understanding that Apple's PR doesn't reflect reality.
> Controversial opinion here, but this is part of the reason I like that Apple makes (practically) all purchases run through them. They don’t sell my information, and they have an incentive to not change that.
I'm sympathetic to this, because I do think it's great that Apple values user privacy. But I think it's unfortunate that the perception is that the only way to get that privacy is to use a heavily locked-down device that the user doesn't actually have control over, and that the entity protecting your privacy has to impose strict restrictions on what you can do with that device.
Obviously Google will never be a good example of a company that protects user data and user privacy; their entire business model depends on the opposite. But that doesn't mean that the concept of a company selling a premium product that protects user privacy by default couldn't also allow users to do whatever they want with their device.
> Why did Apple do this, though? If you recall, Apple's stance on privacy is quite recent. The tech world has a short memory, but I remember Apple being caught red-handed slurping data from user's iPhones not so long ago. Also, unless things have changed (honestly, I haven't followed), Apple tracks users through their native apps, because you're pretty much obligated to go through Apple's SDKs for many things, and they require a tracking ID, which brings revenue to Apple.
This is incredibly misleading. Apple has been mostly criticized for allowing apps to collect excessive user data--for example, apps could access contacts at first without permission. It has been slowly shutting down these methods, as the realization has sunk in the the more open environment of Macs and PCs is just not appropriate for mobile phones. For example, apps in iOS 13 cannot access bluetooth or Wifi information by default, since it was being used to infer location.
Apple does of course collect some user data, e.g. for Siri or app analytics. But it's all painstakingly disclosed and its practices around differential privacy, deletion, and so on are quite good.
The tracking ID was Apple throwing a bone to ad industry and app makers, when it shut down far more precise ways of tracking users.
> what i refer to is being in control of your device after you bought it. Of course you can choose to not buy an Apple device, but after buying it you lose any form of control over your own device.
I think this part is completely tripping you up from understanding all these replies where you dissect comments bit by bit.
People are okay with not having this control. In fact, many pay for it to be done for us, and furthermore, want a more securely, closed environment without the proposed options. To many, this falls apart when more doors and options start to open.
> Apple includes a lot of information about what and how data is stored for their services.
Apple says a lot of things. Just like FB said that they were being responsible with our data. I'm asking Apple to show me what they are doing with my data. If they've been designing their systems properly, this should be simple to do.
> Nearly every service is optional, with the exception of getting OS updates and using the App Store for third-party apps.
But there's still a lot of data that goes back to Apple, which doesn't have to go through them at all.
> Reasonable people can believe that they do show you how your data is stored, so it's important to be more specific about what you're getting at.
But AFAIK, they don't show. They only tell. And I think reasonable people would be distrustful of Marketing-Speak.
> They refuse to allow you to control your data in arbitrary ways.
It doesn't matter how they refuse to allow me to control my data, it matters that they allow me to control my data.
> Reasonable people can believe that they allow you to control your own data if you want to.
But those reasonable people would be factually wrong. It's a fact that their products refuse to decouple themselves from Apple's servers.
> it's important to be more specific about what you're getting at.
Any data. Updates, documents, telemetry data, logs, etc.
I believe that reasonable people would look at what Apple says, then seeing that their actions don't follow, would distrust them. If Apple is spending a lot of effort protecting my data, then why do they work so hard to hide that away from me. To me, that seems like it could have huge marketing potential.
>However, you seem to have missed the point. My problem is not AppleID, my problem is that Apple forced it on my app and threatened to shut me down if I didn't include it
My understanding is that Apple only force you to include this if you provide other third-party login options.
This is a consumer-friendly feature that Apple is forcing you to implement so that your users on Apple platforms can choose to use your app's one-click third party login functionality whist still retaining control about what personal data they share with you.
Apple's platforms require a variety of consumer- and privacy-friendly features from developers who choose to release apps on them, and you could make your same argument against any of them (e.g. not tracking the user without their permission)
That Apple does this and holds third-party developers to standards for privacy and consumer-friendliness is why I (and many others) use their platforms.
>How many passwords do you have to type and licences to accept to do that on your Apple cloud?
No out-of-the-ordinary licenses, I just have to use the find-my app on iOS or my password + the iCloud.com website to locate any of my missing devices (including laptops), and make them play a sound. Apple's internet services are often behind, but I don't think this is a good example here - it just works, the UX is very discover-ably named "find my x", and it's reasonable to require a password for this.
I think we need real competition as consumers. I know I don't want to see Apple's approach of the phone being the product and privacy as a feature being "killed". But I don't think they're in any danger yet.
> they have strong initiative not to keep user data
What makes you say that? Lots of hacks and leaks shows that Apple only see Privacy as a word to sell stuff. It isn't something they code for if not forced by leaks and hacks (laws in the US also is against privacy by design).
> Now there's the obvious argument that people should have the freedom to control all their computing devices, but that freedom comes at a cost, which is that freer devices are, I would suggest, harder to maintain.(i.e. you need to understand more about the operation of the device in order to manage it). If you're a technical person, you may not see this as a problem, but remember mass-market consumers aren't necessarily very technical...
That's a common fallacy perpetuated by Apple and similar companies but it's simply not true. Having the ability to unlock your device, install apps after you enable unknown sources and hange other parts of it do not have to come at the cost for "average user" (whoever that is). You can make a secure simple default and still not waste development time and resources locking down the devices.
> Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't.
It's completely fair to speculate that this is Apple's true goal, but I actually do feel a little bit better about Apple doing this than, say, Facebook, or Google. The reason I feel a little bit better is that Apple at least still has an actual business model where people give them money in exchange for a product. I'm willing to be charitable and speculate that at least some of the reason Apple releases services like this is that it will cause people to continue to buy iPhones (which are wildly profitable).
> Apple initially went all gung ho about privacy and wanted to make not collecting data a big play
My impression always has been that Apple does not collect data that can lead you to be personally identified. I never got any impression that "Apple does not collect data".
>There has to be a way for the physical owner to have full control over the device. It's not even a matter of inmediate benefit, but rather good consumer/human rights policy.
Really? Do you have "full control" over your TV? Your dishwasher? Your microwave? Your car?
I hear this argument on HN, but I've never met an iPhone customer who complained about not being able to side-load apps. Anecdata to be sure, but Apple's goal is to satisfy customers and therefore sell lots and lots of phones. If there were significant customer demand, Apple would work to satisfy that demand.
You cannot set up a HomePod without an iCloud account (over and above an Apple ID).
You cannot install even free apps on iOS without an Apple ID, which requires a telephone number.
It is indeed about control and the acquisition of identified user behavior data. Apple has growth targets to hit and only so much can be done via hardware sales. Services revenue doesn't grow automatically without deep, intense data on a user's habits.
reply