Apple still links services like device bricking to the Find My network. If your iphone is stolen, and you don’t want someone to reset it to use or sell, you HAVE to submit your location data to be a part of the tracker network. Disabling that, Apple sends users a scary nag email that their device is no longer protected.
I love how you took the time to write the years and title of the event… 😁😆😊🤍
Wish there was a website or a wiki that document all this, these companies are basically using philosophical fallacies as a marketing strategy at this point
100%. Most business is just advanced sophistry at this point. Marketing and advertising serves a useful purpose for new products, when the market isn't aware that it exists.
But by quantity and cost, most advertising is just social manipulation and is effectively an extra drain on the economy.
Not exactly true. If you enable “Advanced Data Protection” not even apple can look at your data (with the exception of data which has to be interoperable like calendars and mail)
I’m sure the Google is also encrypting the data with the exception of the interoperable data. So there’s no difference. Why point fingers when Apple do the same?
Apple also know your browsing history. They also know your app usage. They also store your contacts, calendar, photos - just like Google. I don’t see the difference.
Apple is 100% correct. It’s the entire reason Android exists.
Then again, Apple also does a fair bit of data collection. I hate that Apple has been able to market themselves as some kind of bastion of privacy. They aren’t.
Apple is 100% correct. It’s the entire reason Android exists.
Then again, Apple also does a fair bit of data collection. I hate that Apple has been able to market themselves as some kind of bastion of privacy. They aren’t.
So Apple is not 100% correct. They are 50% correct because the second half of their claim is that Apple is somehow different and not tracking its users…
I believe the reason Google acquired Android was to make sure that Apple didn’t dominate the mobile device landscape, which would be a threat to their ad business. The data collection was just a nice side-effect, from their perspective.
I think you underestimate how early Google acquired Android. In 2005, Apple wasn’t even in the mobile device market. Nokia were the dominant handset in those days.
All cell phones are tracking devices. Unless you faraday cage them. But yes, both apple and Android phones give out way more information than just that. And I definitely would not say that I would trust Apple more with data that I would Google.
Genuine question: in what ways do Apple track iOS users (that cannot be turned off)?
I’m of the viewpoint that most tracking can be rather easily be turned off, and that android plays in a totally other ballpark here. But I might very well be wrong.
They both track you fairly closely. There are no winners if you are primarily concerned about privacy. Google is simply more open about it, and provides more access to that data to you (like timeline and takeout).
Actually, the reason Android exists isn’t so one-dimensional.
The company Android was initially concerned more with Microsoft dominating phones like they did computers at the time, before being bought by Google
They created two prototype chains initially, one touch, one that was more akin to BlackBerry
iPhone came out, they ditched the BlackBerry-esque one and focused on what became now Android
Google was mostly just doing what all tech companies were doing at the time, trying to compete in a mobile arms race for dominance. The data tracking was just a bonus. Appeasing shareholders is paramount. Look at how Apple created an Alexa speaker just because they had to as another example of this type of behavior.
Also, Apple actually has a long history of tracking user behavior that predates both Android and the iPhone.
Apple apps since some time shortly after the inception of OS X would (and likely still do) phone home to configuration.apple.com to send apple metrics on usage. Earlier variations of LittleSnitch could actually block this collection behavior.
Apple has since reconfigured the network stack to guarantee that direct encrypted connections to Apple are always possible above any VPN, or other type of network filter connection. So there’s no way to prevent communication with Apple on an Apple product at all now short of keeping it off the Internet or blocking DNS to 17.* IP addresses, which would only work on a network one has control over.
Having to log into a Google account that uniquely identifies you across all your devices and milks you of every single data it can put its filthy hands on?
I am an android user but honestly between the two I think Apple is the lesser evil
Apple has very explicitly stated in very clear terms that the health app does not share data with other apps or devices unless you give permission. And as someone who has given that permission (twice, once to give a meal tracker write permission and once to link to my doctors office’s application for read and write) it’s for every application. It’s not a “hey you need to let everyone have access or no one”. You can get fairly granular.
There’s always the possibility of lying but usually when a company goes that hard on saying the same thing is so many different ways it’s legit. They don’t commit like that unless they know they won’t get in trouble. Those kinds of statements could open them to false advertising claims if it got out they were taking your health data.
I’ll stand corrected on my original comment then. I hope that with Google being dragged through the courts at the moment, perhaps it may inspire more interest and conversation about how our data is handled and how it pertains to the implications around privacy.
You’ve apparently missed the point. Graphene exists solely to harden security and privacy by disabling the googly parts of the phone. That is clearly what was meant by “without Google”
Genuine question. I used to be an avid ROMer back int day until I got really really annoyed at all the hoops I had to jump through to use Google Wallet.
Now I have a Pixel 7a and I’m considering ROMs again. So I am wondering if I can just relock the bootloader once I find a ROM I like and it’ll pass all the Safety net bullshit and allow me to use my phone like it should be, just with a custom ROM on it.
Ultimately you can’t know everything. At some point you have to trust someone. The graphene people seem to know they are doing imo. Ultimately everything is flawed, you just have to know when to say "good enough ". The pixel hardware is pretty great imo and they are often cheap, so I think it’s worth considering them given that they can be hardened in various ways.
Because this will get .001% more total data considering the low number of GrapheneOS users. Besides, this is highly illegal and would result in significant public outcry and legal consequences far greater in cost than any potential benefits.
And if you cannot trust Google with their processors, you cannot trust any other company either.
The people who install Graphene and other modified Android variants on their devices are a lot more likely to be monitoring packets sent from their devices.
Believe me, we’d know the same day an android device that had been de-Googled called home. That would make worldwide news.
@soulfirethewolf@ijeff its biggest lockdown is the security model, which even though it won't disallow you from doing anything you couldn't otherwise do (if you're motivated enough), it draws the line of tradeoffs to make. I gave up rooting and a lot of stuff (like contactless payments) for it's security and stability, and I'm fine with that, but you should ask yourself if that's worth it for you. If you have to go out of your way to break the security model, even once, then it isn't for you.
Did the EU force Apple to switch the iPad to USB-C? For that matter, didn’t Apple have like 20 or so engineers on the USB-C spec?
I don’t know how much more hate Apple can get, their mere existence enables an entire tech-journalism ecosystem dedicated to laying out their evils and predicting their demise. It’s good for the economy!
Interesting perspective. Apple did not roll it out on their phones for reasons of greed like I said. Their team being involved in the spec only makes it more frustrating that they refused to fucking adopt it universally.
I don’t know how much more hate Apple can get
I would say I don’t know how much corporate cock can be sucked by the public. This is the world’s first trillion dollar company for fuck’s sake
Apple didn’t make enough off of Lightning for greed to be a factor. Hell the majority of Lightning cables sold were unlicensed knockoffs from Amazon and the grocery checkout aisle.
The reason Apple is so rich is that Apple isn’t really dominant in any of the markets they compete at this point(save for the tablet and watch, and that dominance is basically due to the incompetence of Microsoft(surface sucked and Android makers exited the market)) and Google(wearOS evaporated for like 3 years)).
Apple is rich because aside from a few high profile failures, they sell premium products that are competent in targeted categories, and their competitors sell a wide variety products of varying quality in every market category imaginable. What happens then is if Apple releases a new ithing, you can probably buy it and be good, so one Apple purchase leads to another, and they all sync, so might as well pay for iCloud, etc.
But don’t forget, Apple gets billions of dollars from Google too, to be default webpage… So they’re totally complicit, and in practice, they’re effectively selling your user data to google.
The biggest issue with Apple has always been their dodgy marketing. 20 years ago, they were living off the incorrect claim that “MacOS can’t get Viruses”, and now, seems to be just as dodgy with privacy.
At the end of the day, being as big as they are makes both of them malicious, manipulative and exploitative per default, otherwise they wouldn’t be multi-billion or even trillion dollar companies in the first place.
I would like to think that the percentage of users who have grapheneOS is maybe 5% of the pixel population. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass right now but basically a lot of people who want the very best privacy and security go for graphene which is limited to only Pixels even though there are more cool phones like the fp5.
There are some people who use other roms like Lineage without the google apps. It’s not as good as Graphene but it’s better than the OEM version that comes with the phones.
Lineage is by far the most popular custom ROM and it has about 3.2 million active devices. Which is about nothing in comparison to 1.22 billion smartphones sold alone in 2022. Barely anyone uses third party ROMs.
Opening a space for an OS fork led by a consortium of mobile phone manufacturers that don't have a vested interest in supporting their ad and tracking business would be an overall benefit. Google sees value in android only for that, and that's a major problem.
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