uroshnor

The Digital Transformation Agency isn't a company. Its part of the government - specifically the Department of Finance, and has overall responsibility for the Commonwealth government's strategic procurement and use of technology, including things like government-to-citizen Apps and services.

They subcontracted a local developer to build at least one of the Apps for DTA (and the figure quoted is way too high for just the DTA's Coronavirus App, which would have been 1-2 people over a weekend at best). The COVIDSafe app is more complex than that, but 1.85 M seems way too high for just front end development of 2 simple apps, so there must be more to it than that.

https://www.crn.com.au/news/canberras-delv-awarded-185-million-for-developing-covid-19-app-546593

Delv are a small-ish solution integrator who do things like manage MDMs and do development work for agencies. They aren't exclusively Apple, but have been doing stuff pretty well on Apple platforms for a long time.

I'd also note the holding of contact data was covered in detail here:

https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/covidsafe-application-privacy-impact-assessment

And there's fairly harsh legislation about discrimination associated with and unauthorised use of the App's data that has been put before parliament. 

I'm not exactly a superfan of the current government, but given how governments work, they've done a pretty good job here under time pressure, and the efforts to do the right kind of things really appear to be there (they are just in tension with the "be seen to be doing something" and "hey we are government so we'll just do things the hard way" factors)

Peza said:

I must say I’ve noticed the little arrow appear at the top of the screen a lot these days. I was suspecting iOS sending data, glad to see it confirmed, also not glad as it makes a complete mockery of privacy and security settings in iOS, and makes Apples ‘what’s on your iPhone stays on your iPhone’ advertising campaign seem incredibly hypocritical. I’ve noticed the gps arrow on my iPhone XR and iPad Pro.

Apple has recently proved it is no different, indeed in some cases worst, then Amazon or Google or even Facebook with data collection recently. And appears to only be offering solutions once caught red handed with its hand in the cookie jar!. It really should be the polar opposite. Particularly considering all the health information the company gathers on you if you wear an Apple Watch.

Perhaps as suggested, it would be far better for Apple to be completely upfront and honest about it’s data collecting and tracking features, in plain English and not buried in cleverly worded text in a multi page end user agreement. Change it’s wording.
That way they won’t appear as the bad guys, and everyone knows where they stand. Location services are useful, just be up front with how they work.

So there's a few things in this that don't quite add up, but I'll bite.

Perhaps you could articulate how Apple is "worse" than Amazon, Google or FaceBook with respect to data collection ? That is an extraordinary claim that warrants extraordinary evidence to support it (given Amazon, Google and Facebook are 3 of the world's largest collectors of personal information, and all of them actively generate income from the personal information they collect, and two of them own two of the largest data brokerages in the world)

Second the arrows don't mean Apple has collected ANY data about location at all. Words have meaning to lets get specific - if Apple "collects" data then its sent from your device to Apple centrally, and in a form Apple can decrypt or read - ie it leaves your device in some form, and Apple itself can do something with the data. eg A lot of the "Find My" service data passes through Apple servers, but Apple can't decrypt it, as its encrypted with asymmetric keys that only exist on a users devices. So its not "collection". How "Find my" works was explained in a talk by Apple at BlackHat 2019 this year.

If a process or App running on the device does something that is requests location-related information, that does not automatically mean that Apple "collected" it. Even if data is sent to Apple, it doesn't mean Apple can read it. Saying any process triggering an arrow in the UI constitutes collection of data is wrong from both a technical and legal perspective. 

Thirdly, the way that location services work, is things like monitoring for iBeacon region entry/exit, or "awareness of what country am I in" will by definition access location information. 

Fourthly the arrow may not have anything to do with GPS, and the AppleInsider commentary is wrong in framing things that way. Apple devices use GPS, GLONASS, Baidu, Galileo and QZSS satellite systems, but they also use cell towers, Bluetooth and Wi-fi network mapping. All of that underlying location stuff has different levels of accuracy, and some of it works indoors, some of it only outdoors. Software doesn't access almost any of that directly - a developer usually has to set up a Core Location Manager instance to get called back when the device knows the location to the requested accuracy. eg Apple knowing what set of transit directions to supply in Maps, only requires a resolution to the city level - typically 10's of km, and wouldn't generally be considered a sensitive level of location, but it would totally trigger an arrow.

sflocal said:

Fortunately, Android has a far, far larger market share so these developers can simply go and mooch whatever personal data they want from Android users.  

A major reason why I use an iPhone is precisely due to Apple's privacy policies.  If those developers feel the need to base part of their business models in tracking my whereabouts - most likely without my explicit permission - then cry me a river.

That’s the thing. It doesn’t, in the markets that matter to these vendors. Android’s global share is largely propped up by its high penetration at low price points in developing countries.

in places like the US/UK/Australia iOS is often around 50% (or higher)  of installed base, due to the useful longevity of devices (even when Android sells more new devices they drop out of usage faster, and under-index in installed base).

So I get why they are worried - it will hurt them from a product standpoint.

I think Apple is doing the right thing, and not anti-competitive because it does not compete with these SW vendors.

elijahg said:

DuhSesame said:

elijahg said:

lkrupp said:

Painful ride ahead for those who don’t accept change well. I’ve been riding the Apple rollercoaster since 1982. The worst change for me was the move to Intel processors in Macs as I had bought into the RISC vs CISC propaganda and Intel was the enemy. But I got over it. 

It's not about "accepting change," some things have no alternative; perhaps you could try being less arrogant occasionally. People have setups that require things like the hardware RAID, and may have spent a lot of money for such a system. There are plenty of places still using PPTP too, and "accepting change" means those people will no longer be able to connect to PPTP VPN servers, often company ones. This again just results in a worse experience for Mac users.

Yeah, Microsoft did that a lot, look how much a pile Windows is.

There's a difference between keeping cruft like 16-bit compatibility and dropping features a number of people use. PPTP support was actually dropped in Mojave, and students at the entire university campus had to hold off on upgrading while they tested some third party Forticlient system, which they now use. I'd much rather a first party thing than traffic travelling across some unknown third party's servers. Yes there was a few months warning that Apple would drop it when they should have tested it, but a couple of months isn't really that long for a big organisation like a university to fully test something entirely new.

Specifically regarding PPTP...

you need to pull up out of the weeds and take a bigger picture view than “Apple dropped support in Mojave and only gave 3 months notice”.

Whilst that’s true, they announced deprecation of PPTP 2 years prior with Sierra.

its irretrievably broken as a VPN protocol, and there are complete, prebuilt tool chains that can crack PPTP traffic.

The theoretical problems were identified nearly 20 years ago, and by 2013ish, people had built simple to use tools to bust it wide open.

These are fundamental flaws in PPTP, not simply implementation bugs.

Using it in 2019, is not defensible from a security perspective, as it’s been broken for so long, and known to be broken at a theoretical level for even longer. Using today is arguably worse than doing nothing, as you a pretending something is secure for theatric purposes knowing it just isn’t any use at all.

Positioning it as “Apple did not give organizations enough time to migrate” when they have a 2 year lead time before dropping it, the thing they need to migrate off is a dumpster fire that is well known to be deeply flawed & vulnerable to widely available attacker tools for the better part of a decade is not a reasonable criticism of Apple, but actually a very deep criticism of that uni’s IT team. 

So the article does not really describe likely what’s is happening.

Right now , iOS reads NDEF format over NFC, and can respond in a few other formats. (And its pretty strict, it doesn’t do Smart Posters for example, which are a modification of NDEF).

E-Passports can be encoded in as few different ways, but most are BAC encoded. This means the NFC data is an encrypted blob, and the encryption key is derived from the data on the photo page.

That’s why at a check in kiosk, you usually put your e-Passport face down and the photo page is being scanned concurrently with reading the chip.

If you try it today, the Phone realists the epassport is there, but it rejects the encrypted data as invalidly formatted.

Apple doesn’t need to open up access to the NFC subsystem to read an e-passport, they just need to add an API that supports reading the common encrypted passport formats (eg reading a BAC e-Passport with a supplied key). If they were being super slick, they’d have an API that extracted the key material from an image of the photograph page in the vision framework, and you could pass that straight on to the CoreNFC code.

If they can do that its super-slick flow, and may even enable Apple Wallet to hold government grade identity cards.