Alex_V

Calamander said:

Alex_V said:

Conclusion: Smartphone A is made by a company that respects your privacy, and does much to protect it. After all, your smartphone has a lot of personal information that you want to keep private. Smartphone B is made by a company whose business model is to spy on you for profit. Nothing that you do on that phone is private. Decision, decisions, decisions.

Apple vs Google in privacy has unfortunately become a battle of the "lesser evil" and you're saying Apple is (still) the lesser evil. 

Once upon a time, this was Apple's DNA and belief - when Jobs was around, basically.

 Since then, the "why" has changed. Apple has more privacy because (1) it can use it for advertising, and (2) it's been pretty bad at making its ad system work and (3) that's because of motivation, Apple makes all its money on hardware. 

The moment Apple figures out how to add a billion in revenue to the bottom line by compromising your privacy, you can bet they will choose the money. So that advantage is on unstable ground. 

Apple has already compromised its values too many times to count, removing apps from app stores in Hong Kong on request of the Chinese government, removing apps on behest of the US government, basically any government anywhere asks Apple to censor the app store, Apple does it. This is about protecting profits - I am not saying it's unreasonable, but ... given that Apple loves to get on the high horse on political topics, it's hypocritical to the extreme. They do the dirty like all other large conglomerates. 

They basically do not have values. They only care about profits, and anything that they do that they pretend to be values, like diversity, are actually things that imrpove their bottom line and they wouldn't do any of them if they negatively affected the bottom line. That's not values. That's hypocrisy. Would be better to be honest. 

Google has long abandoned its "don't be evil" corporate motto. And they've gotten ever more evil. 

 That is like saying that nurses and doctors only go into medicine because they have a fetish for the colour green. 

Apple has had a long-standing commitment to privacy. Here is Steve Jobs talking about it in 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPogdNafgic
At the time, I didn’t understand what was a stake. Companies like Google and Facebook had secretly figured out their business model and were implementing it wholesale — unlimited surveillance of their users, massive data collection, for the purpose of targeted advertising. Interestingly, the horrifically dystopian United States NSA were doing similar things around the same time: these people realised that they could now build the capacity to spy on everyone on earth. 

Apple doesn’t spy on us, because they are a hardware, software, and services company. They always were. They enjoy stunning success with that business model. It is the perfect argument against the Google-business-model. We don’t have to enter into a Faustian bargain with a bunch of duplicitous tech-bros: “We’ll install an OS on your Samsung smartphone for FREE! (And in return we’ll spy on you forever)” That part in brackets is unadvertised and unacknowledged, and most consumers simply don’t know about it, which I why I bring it up at every opportunity. Remember how Google and others pushed back strongly when Apple introduced app privacy settings? What was all the fuss about? Apple was letting users know, and giving them a say in the matter. That is what Google objected to. Compare Apple’s and Alphabet’s Sankey charts:
https://realrate.ai/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Apple-Sankey-chart.webp
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*6VKdItsAo1x8jYnt4aUr-g.png

Apple realises that they have a duty to protect our data. Imagine the legal hell that would descend on them if they didn’t. Thus they perfected fingerprint sensors, they offer hard drive encryption on the fly, face ID etc. In this respect, the company’s mantra appears to be security without compromising easy-of-use. 

Patriotism (may be) the last refuge of a scoundrel. But not before the scoundrel has attempted to tar everyone with the same brush. “Apple is no angel.” “Everyone is doing it.” “There are worse companies than Google.” “That’s old news.” “It’s too late, just accept it.” Every form of gas-lighting imaginable. 

Conclusion: Smartphone A is made by a company that respects your privacy, and does much to protect it. After all, your smartphone has a lot of personal information that you want to keep private. Smartphone B is made by a company whose business model is to spy on you for profit. Nothing that you do on that phone is private. Decision, decisions, decisions.

Absolutely nothing that you do on this phone is private. Alphabet, which owns Google, is an advertising company. They provide search, software, and hardware, and other technologies, solely as a means to spy on us. They build detailed profiles on each and every one of us, the likes of which we have never seen before. In violation of our right to privacy, they scan our emails, record our searches, videos watched, and catalogue every intimate detail about us. They sell that knowledge, as well as the access to us, to other advertisers. All this is done in the service of advertising, and making a buck. These guys would make the East German Stasi blush. And yet, governments around the world, do little to protect us from this scourge, which is far worse that the most pessimistic predictions about invasions of our privacy that I remember from the early days of the world wide web. 

This is, evidently, still a thing, I first saw this concept more than ten years ago:
https://www.doublerobotics.com/

gatorguy said:

It's so cute that you believe it's simply "Google surveillance" we need to be protected from. OMG, think of the ads! /s. Open your eyes to what's going on around you. [snip]

It’s a feature of the interned today, that we’re permanently harried by nation-state or party-political bullies — think Putin’s IRA, Modi’s Hindus, Erdogan, Israel etc. flooding the zone with sh*t, or we’re defending science against minimum-wage corporate trolls who are paid to copy-paste line-manager approved comments, or covid conspiracy d*cks contorting themselves to defend their favourite white bigot, the list is endless. Add to that, something that happens so often — insulting/condescending, unethical hacks who pretend that they are just Joe Citizen engaging in debate, and don’t have the decency to declare their financial interests or other ties to the subject at hand.