Apple's brand is tarnished in my eyes. I already got rid of my iPhone and won't be returning. The fact that they even announced this is proof that they only ever cared about providing a facade of privacy.
Apple is not to be trusted in terms of privacy. Nobody knows what their software is actually doing. It's all closed source. Their focus on privacy in their advertisements does not mean that their software actually protects users' privacy.
This is by far the biggest misstep of Tim Cook’s tenure at Apple thus far.
If they don’t kill this program soon, it’s going to overshadow the entire upcoming iPhone event, and will follow Apple around like a dark cloud for years.
I can see the headlines now: “New iPhone launches amid massive new privacy concerns.”
Anytime someone praises Apple for privacy, anywhere on the internet, there will be a tidal wave of people bringing up this program in rebuttal. From people who would have previously defended Apple to the grave!
I cannot fathom how on earth anybody thought this was a good idea. It’s like taking decades and billions of dollars worth of hard won reputation for privacy and throwing it in the garbage at the worst possible moment.
This is what made me stop using Apple products altogether. Their privacy and security bit is all smoke and mirrors, and I'd much rather just directly understand what my privacy model looks like instead of trying to surmise what's going on through the other side of the frosted glass. Their compliance with China's Uighur roundup is despicable, and I don't trust them in the slightest to defend tech in the long-term. They're out to make money, which is why they're the most profitable business in the world.
Apple has made huge compromises to try and give some privacy back to the consumer, who lost it all from paying for cheap products where the product is you. And people just ignore this progress because they want to be anti-Apple. It's sad.
Honestly, Apple's privacy move over the years is genius. Its going to be a long time, maybe never, before I buy something besides an iPhone. I don't even like Phones(in general) that much and Apples aggressive cable policies drive me insane but this is getting really scary.
Apple has literally proposed using the phone you bought and paid for to spy on you and report you to the authorities if you do bad things. While they backed down from that plan, they went out of their way to make it clear that they were only backing down temporarily. To suggest that iOS is ahead in privacy is ludicrous.
I'll keep buying phones that only use cloud services that spy on me, instead of spying on me directly. At least that's somewhat defensible as it's not my hardware acting against me.
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