Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.
I wouldn’t say all of the privacy changes or even the majority of them are to ensure lock-in, but they have certainly been using their privacy stance as a pretext for lock-in.
If Apple cared about privacy ssh would be well supported OOTB and you'd be able to build your apps from the source.
There's no way to do this, even if you pay all the fees push notifications won't work unless you publish to the app store and that will get rejected for being a duplicate.
Like all corporations, Apple only cares about making a profit. Their business model let them implement much stronger privacy guarantees than their competitors, and this differentiation has been a profitable avenue for them. But ultimately if there’s any lock-down they can get away with (i.e. without affecting their profits either directly or via fines and legislation) they’ll try it, and privacy/security misfeatures are a great way to couch these regressions without appearing directly hostile.
That being said, I don’t think Apple’s privacy stance is all hot air, they publish plenty of white papers on their infrastructure. I mostly think they’re greedy and don’t mind harming the user and developer experience to ensure they get their cut from every transaction that occurs inside their ecosystem.
Apple is the only big tech company left that even pretends to care about privacy and does even a half-assed job of it. If they're doing it in part for self-interested reasons, that's fine. It's better than nothing.
Their cloud storage product even has on-device encryption. Nobody else offers that, and in fact AFAIK Google and some of the others even have it listed as against their ToS. They're also working on privacy-respecting AI services and on-device AI as a first class citizen, which is different from any other company. All other AI products are designed for maximum privacy invasion.
Google, Microsoft, and the entire mobile app ecosystem are all actively hostile to user privacy and seek to undermine it as a primary mission and policy.
Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. What you have right now is just a centralized store of all your data on Apple's servers.
Well... yes, one does have to make good decisions and be intentional about using private software even on open platforms. But at least with open platforms, one has the choice to do so without a corporation being able to unilaterally wipe something away from that platform, or impose terms on that software due to market capture.
iOS and macOS are not the same product. If you want a real computer you have to get a Mac, which is why I do not own an iPad. IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones.
The iPhone does everything I want a phone to do, but that's not much: web, a few apps, turn by turn directions, texting, e-mail, etc.
> IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones.
You're of course free to define things as you wish personally (and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with yout), but it should be noted that we start getting into the realm of:
These people are generally not technically knowledgeable at all. If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them.
I grew up with the open Internet starting in the 1990s. I feel like a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around just how hostile and riddled with scams and hustler bullshit it's become. The mobile ecosystem is the worst, possibly even more user-hostile than the web. The potential for privacy invasion is a lot higher too since people carry their phones around.
The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war. The iPhone is actually not locked down enough to protect most users' privacy.
> If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them.
That's extremely hyperbolic. Not every Android phone got infested immediately with malware, despite shipping out of the box with the ability to sideload apps. I don't think the platform would have survived if that were the case.
> The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war.
That's quite a bleak outlook. One seemingly founded in fear without any faith in free software and the communities around it.
Sure, a person needs to learn some caution in installing and running software, but there aren't monsters around every single corner. There are communities that do a lot of work, without expectation of compensation, to provide safe, trustworthy software.
The internet is _not_ a dark forest. It is a place with people of many stripes and intentions. Some are dangerous, but shooting first and asking questions later is _not_ the way to navigate this wondrous thing humanity has built.
This isn't a problem on Linux because there's a careful community oriented path for users who may not understand what they're doing without cutting things off from knowledgeable users.
In fact OSX let everyone just download and run binaries and even that didn't have this problem. That's not a hypothetical situation, literally everyone used computers that way until recently.
There's a long tail of people who will manage to blow their devices up regardless but maybe they shouldn't be using computers unaided. It's very frustrating to make literally everyone else's lives harder just for them.
I’m a programmer by trade who grew up on DOS and early Macintosh computers and ran Gentoo on my main machine for a bunch of years. I’ve done sysadmin work and Internet system architecture and blah blah blah.
The reality of my actual behavior these days is that my primary device is an iPhone. All the stuff I do that actually matters in my personal life (not work) takes place there.
“Real” computers are worse at or totally incapable of doing a lot of what it does for me (I don’t want to use a laptop for turn-by-turn directions or to hail an Uber or whatever, to call out just a couple examples) and its lack of “real” computing capabilities are somewhere between irrelevant-to and beneficial-for what I need it to do and how I need it to operate.
I use Windows and Linux for play but nothing that matters happens there. If every computing device I own except my phone stopped working, I would have no actual need whatsoever to replace them, and nothing bad or even inconvenient would happen. (Exception for my work MacBook, but I don’t own that)
> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.
The issue anytime this thread comes up are binary statements like the above. There's a lot more nuance here where privacy changes are likely both. When ATT came out it was good for the user, but also poked FB in the eye which I'm sure Apple enjoyed.
Which is a great pitch to use Apple devices. The software community seems to hate it but I have a theory that one of the reasons Apple commands such a premium is because regular users don't actually like the software people all that much.
Apple protecting user privacy for selfish reasons is a wonderful thing. It means they are going to keep doing it for as long as they can manage until the legislators step in.
I would hate to see a world where this sentiment is widespread when others are trying to fight for the right to repair and other causes and Apple is doing nothing but lobbying against them.
It's amazing how successful they are at virtue signaling about privacy while selling your traffic to Google, the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism, for tens of billions of dollars. Laundering the reputation through the slightest bit of indirection is all it takes.
Don't forget Apple's super-safe ultra-private AI collaboration with security mastermind (and former interim Reddit CEO) Sam Altman. When your data enters OpenAI's servers, it's trusted with the same cryptographic geniuses that brought you Worldcoin.
If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers?
> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users…
This is reductionist, and multiple things can be true at the same time. There’s no doubt that Apple has realized privacy is a competitive advantage, and as a customer, it’s one of the reasons I give them money.
Even if you could lay bare the deepest desires and true motives of everyone involved, the result of those motives is a product that is more private and more secure than most alternatives.
To boil this down to “this is only about lock-in” completely sidesteps a myriad of other factors in play.
Editing to add: I'm not saying Apple is blameless here or that their advertising goals and other business deals shouldn't be scrutinized. I'm not even saying that I buy their privacy marketing, but there is an objective difference between their current model and the companies that exist purely on the basis of selling customer data. I find it really problematic to equate them with the behavior of the Metas and Alphabets of the industry.
> If Apple’s product is its users, who are its customers?
Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue.
Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization. That's just revenue from one company and that's just to be the default search engine.
When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable.
Google is buying search traffic from Apple, not user dossiers. To conflate the two is a category error. Even when you consider Apple’s advertising business, it cannot be argued in good faith that they are behaving in the same way most large advertising-driven companies are operating. Selling ads is not by itself enough to make the claim that “users are the product”, and to whatever extent they are, the ad business is secondary and coexists with their core business of selling hardware and services. This remains a meaningful distinction for people who want to buy products not fully predicated on selling their private details.
The reductionist take removes all context and makes it impossible to have a substantive discussion about these finer points, and reductionism in general is against site guidelines.
> When people describe services where “the user is the product”, they’re generally referring to the fact that the primary business model of the company selling those services is to impinge on individual privacy by collecting extremely detailed information about those users and then selling that information to interested parties. It is that intimate detail that makes each user so valuable
This is your personal definition that suits your argument. I'm not going to get into a debate about semantics.
This phrase has been around since at least 2010 and has been popularized over the years by many big names in tech and media circles ranging from Tim O'Reilly and Bruce Schneier to Jake Tapper among many many others. In most cases, that coverage was just highlighting discussions already happening across various social spaces. And the concept behind this sentiment can be traced to earlier TV advertising days. Not my personal definition. [0][1][2][3][4][5] (there are dozens, if not hundreds more).
I've never heard anyone use it to describe Apple's approach to ads or search agreements until this comment thread. I'm not excited about debating semantics, but there's a lot of conceptual weight attached to the phrase that can't be ignored here.
> Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization.
Huh? Apple's market capitalization is $3.44 trillion as of today, and the unit of market cap is not dollars per year, so you're conflating categories here.
If you mean yearly revenue, $20 billion is 5% of Apple's 2023 revenue. Compare that to Meta, where ad revenue is like, 98% of their ~$135 billion revenue in 2023. These are different categories of companies, no matter how you slice it. You're fighting the wrong enemy here.
They are explicitly purchasable. What do you think advertising on the App store is? What do you think Google paying $20 billion to be the default search engine is?
The App store isn't an intellectual treadmill the way Youtube, for example, is. How much time have you actually spent browsing your platform's App store? Compare that to the time people spend hooked on Youtube, Tiktok, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Apple isn't an ad company in the same way these other companies are, you're kidding yourself if you think they're the same.
Apple's revenue in 2023 was 383 billion dollars. Ad revenue was, from what I can tell... 9 billion. Let's add the 20 from Google on top of that, so 29 billion is 7% of their revenue for 2023.
Compare that to Meta. 134 billion in 2023. Ad revenue? 131 billion.
Apologies, I was meaning that as "even if we grant that they are not purchasable." That is, I wasn't wanting to argue the point of if you can directly purchase it, as that doesn't seem important for the point?
You're right it isn't necessary to the point and no need to apologize. I just don't want to give apologists for this terrible behavior a rhetorical out.
Apple's revenue from advertising is tiny compared to its revenue from other sources, while Google's revenue from other sources is tiny compared to its revenue for advertising.
