this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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The “walled garden” is both what the average Apple customer wants, and what technophiles despise. Most iPhone users want the full assurance that they can download any app without performing research, knowing it won’t crash their indispensable device or track their every move. Say what you want about the limits of customization, it’s probably true, but Apple’s tight leash on software is precisely why iPhone is so reliable and private.
private, bro? are u kidding me?
Yes. Apple has the best privacy policy in the industry.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
Yeah, they won't let anyone else profit off of their user's information. They'll do it, but nobody else can.
Say what you will about Apple, they are masters of spinning their shortcomings as groundbreaking achievements. When they refused to unlock the iPhone of the san bernardino terrorist attack, it was framed as an act of preserving user privacy, but brushed over how willing they were to hand over the iCloud backups if the police would have brought the iPhone to a known WiFi network for the backup to be uploaded.
exactly!
They don’t profit off of user information. It’s against their privacy policy. Ask for your GDPR compliant file from Apple. It’ll contain your name, billing address, and phone number (if you have an iPhone). Apple and third-party developers can display a prompt to request data collection for app improvement. It is completely voluntary.
Privacy policies are toilet paper without independent audits and the axillary ability to access source code.
💯
do you really trust them?
I don’t need to. It’s visible in their software. It runs on a UNIX kernel, so the application and operating system layers are independent. They restrict all APIs, both first and third-party, until a request for access has been approved by the user. The encryption they use for iCloud, iMessage, and FaceTime transmission is end-to-end, and local device encryption is hardware encoded, requiring local passcode entry to decrypt.
no it is not visible because their source code is closed
Tell that to jailbreakers. Lol
Security is not synonim with privacy.
I'm pretty sure anybody who develops anything in the jailbreaking scene can tell you that Apple's source code is not open to the public.
What industry? Does this industry you mentioned happens only contains data hungry ad oligopolies like google, facebook and bytedance; but happens to exclude all the reasonable alternatives like Mozilla, duckduckgo, grapheneos, calyxos, desktop linux, mastodon, and lemmy?
The consumer personal computer industry.
I got a feeling that many consumers do use desktop linux, given the recently revealed 4% desktop market share across the world. macOS has 15% market share (around 3 times desktop linux), and Windows at the dominant 72% (around 3 times macOS). See https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
I believe macOS probably is more private than Windows, but it is definitely not as private as the rest of the industry.
Sure, open source will always have the potential for the most privacy, assuming the user is savvy enough to maintain updated security. The article was primarily focused on Apple’s hold of the smartphone market. In the US, the only real competition is Android. Google is transparent about their consumer data use, and they also don’t offer much in the form of personal information privacy outside of encrypted RCS. For example, third-party apps can access user data and enable hardware APIs without first requiring user permission.
Okay, I mentioned desktop because you mentioned "personal computer industry" which I assumed means desktop/laptops.
I think there are indeed more private (some can even be more secure) alternative to iOS, like calyx and/or graphene.
But like you said, they do require a reasonable amount of computing literacy to install: first they need to know these projects exists, then they will need to connect their phone to their computer and click a single button.
Thus, I think there is indeed no private and "popular" alternative to iOS, that a completely tech illiterate person can easily obtain.
It’s interesting, because for my iPhone that is true. I was a bit concerned with the walled garden, but made the switch from Android because of privacy (not that Apple is perfect, just much better than Google). I can’t recall a single time when i wanted or needed more than what the iPhone offered.
But with my iPad there are multiple times when i wished i could run a local web dev environment, or run MacOS apps (it is using the save M1 as my computer after all)
Agreed. I’m hoping the move to M chips for iPad Pro will come with some macOS software compatibility in the future.
What about discovering and installing private app that don't use proprietary big tech service, including sending push notifications?
On android this is very easy, you can just search and install apps from fdroid, where all apps has been manually audited to make sure there is no telemetry and proprietary dependencies, including network service dependency.
Fdroid also build all the apps in their app store to prevent developers from secretly inject backdoors (think xz backdoor, and xcode ghost).
I don't believe the fdroid model works in Apple's walled garden.
i used fdroid when i used Android, but now i feel like it is a false sense of security. like, yeah, the apps themselves might not have telemetry, but the whole OS itself is a giant spyware made by the largest ad company in the world, so unless you are using a rooted, custom rom that has taken all the google apis out of the way, i still feel that my data is safer in ios than android with fdroid. the only real way to have data fully safe is too minimize the use of apps completely thou
i would use apps from an ios version of fdriod, if i had the chance, thou, so i think your point is valid
I think it is useful to use fdroid in conjunction with private OS like graphene, divest and calyx all with excellent android compatibilities. Unfortunately, grapheneos, IMO the best of the three, is only avaliable on a small set of devices (so is ios).
But I do agree with your point, if you use the stock android, even with privacy hardening, it is probably still not so private. But I don't know if a hardened stock android is "worse" than an average user's iPhone.
I don't totally agree but you're definitely onto something there. I will absolutely never be simpathetic to that vision, but you're right that Apple knows their audience.
If you throw a linux OS to an average user, they would want to download app from the web instead of installing from app store. Average user don't "want" to download app from the app store, they do that because they are "told" to do so.
I don't believe most average user "love" anything, they only want their device to "work", no matter what the privacy, security, and environmental concerns are. Plus apple's repeated propaganda, which makes many people believe that Apple is reasonably private and eco-conscious.
I think one of the best decision apple has ever made is to start shitty and thus never enshittify. After a while, people accepted the shittiness of apple; yet Windows continuing to enshittify by putting ads everywhere, thus people feel like their old and good experiences have been taken away from them.
I an obviously not saying Windows is better than macOS, they are both shitty in different ways. But I feel like Window's recent enshittification in some way contributed to the recent decline of Windows and rise of macOS.