“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,”
“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”
This is a great strategy to win the hearts and minds of privacy advocates like me and take shots at companies like Google at the same time.
But it's still mostly bullshit, though, especially coming from a company using closed source software for most of its products. Nobody can really tell what they are collecting, what they do with it and how much of it they share with third parties (including governments).
If you google a bit, I bet you will find similar speeches from every single big company CEO these past years: "Privacy is our number one priority, blah blah blah".
If you think Apple is different just because Tim Cook has great speech writers, you're being naive.
All these companies are in it to win your private information, and we are all prepared to give them some of our private information if what we get in return is worth it. That's the game, simple.
As I never tire of pointing out, he was actually pointing out how to protect your privacy from the federal government before many cared at all:
> "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?"
> "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."
But that never got play back then, so we get the incomplete quote everywhere. It took Edward Snowden to make the tech blogs finally change narrative.
The government doesn't force Google to run their business the way they do, dependent as it is on such huge amounts of personal information, to provide "better" (for some peoples value for better) targeted ads.
If Google don't track/store what I search for, what results I click through to, etc, it doesn't matter what the US government asks them for - they are technically unable to hand over data they don't have.
I guess. It's a tradeoff, really. I find it very convenient to store all my photos with Google, for instance, and I make that decision with eyes wide open. Same with search history or even location history. I'm sympathetic to the argument that there are a lot of consumers making that decision without full knowledge (the help documents are actually pretty good[1], but you have to know they exist to read them). However, I'm not remotely sympathetic to the idea there's no possible reason one would make that tradeoff.
I think, sadly, that's not true. The government can force them to change their business, and begin recording personal information that passes through their hands. Its very strange.
There is a lot of tracking Google does that couldn't just be instantly turned on at the request of a government if Google wasn't already doing it.
For example Google Analytics: if that product didn't exist the government couldn't just ask Google to install tracking scripts on half the websites in the world without anybody noticing.
You could argue that the government could force Google to create and market Google Analytics. But that just re-enforces the idea that we shouldn't be using Google Analytics - we don't even know if it isn't entirely a program created at the request of the US government (I don't actually believe this, but it's where you end up if you start worrying about the government forcing Google to change their business).
If you have a site where this would be a significant worry for you, then yes, you absolutely shouldn't be using a CDN (or, at least, should only be using it in limited ways; images are probably safe); the CDN provider or anyone who can control it can do you a lot of damage.
The correct analogy would be "by that argument, everyone should think very carefully about the pros and cons of using a CDN to serve part/all of their website".
Which.... is true anyway, regardless of the potential for government-enforced data collection.
As magicalist points out in his response, you are taking Schmidt's quote completely out of context. Don't feel bad, you're not the only one.
Schmidt (and Google) are extremely pro-privacy and against sharing information with the government. Google must have like ten lawsuits going on at all times on the entire planet trying to fight intrusive data request from governments. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to prevent governments from gaining access to their data.
At least with Android being open source, they have a reasonable track record of transparency (obviously, that doesn't apply to their search logs, which are still proprietary).
> Schmidt (and Google) are extremely pro-privacy and against sharing information with the government.
Privacy doesn't mean "don't share my data with the government".
> They spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to prevent governments from gaining access to their data
Funny how you say "Google are extremely pro-privacy" and then describe the vast amassed personal information of users as "their data", referring to Google.
That's exactly what privacy means. When I'm dancing naked in my house, I don't care if the guy holding the IR camera across the road is a government employee or a company's employee. All I care is that he has a camera.
If some private data of mine (including, but not limited to pictures of my genitalia) ended up someplace other than on a medium I own, that data is no longer private. I.e. it was a privacy breach.
This is exactly what "Apple-is-better" people on this thread do not get.
They are suggesting that the Apple IR camera is good because it improves the user "experience by syncing with itunes to play a song with the right tempo as you dance" as opposed to the Google IR camera which will result in sun-burn cream ads. What the typical person would want is no IR camera at all.
> Apple collects far less personal data than Google/etc
Agreed.
I don't know if we are disagreeing. Or perhaps you disagree with the notion that the ideal situation for privacy is when no personal collection is done?
Android is becoming less and less open source by the minute. Google used the opensourcedness as a trojan horse to get the OEMs, but now it's pulling it away.
Ignore that: Google had to rein shitty OEMs in because they were trashing the brand as bad as OEMs screwed Windows. Bad OOBE, inconsistent, buggy, etc. Using GApps as a carrot/stick is something they should have had from the beginning.
There may be other reasons, but the QA aspect is enough that Google would have to hit the OEMs, even if Google wanted to promote open source.
It's funny how Google advocates always "bash" apple for being "closed source" when this company ships the most popular Unix in the world... and all of their products, even the watch, are based on it. Yes, they do keep the Application/UI layer closed source, but so does google ("Google Apps").
Yet google has spend years propagandizing that they are "open" while Apple is "closed" and that plays right into the latent desire to hate Apple from those who got a PC instead of a Mac when they were a kid.
Apple is different because for nearly 40 years they have been honest and forthright and treating people different. Google says "don't be evil" and then goes out and does evil. Apple doesn't say it, they just don't do it.
The idea that all these companies want private info and thus are all going to be evil is cynical.
And it ignores the fundamental truth: Apple's product is really nice software sold in a hardware box. Google's product is your private info.
> The idea that all these companies want private info and thus are all going to be evil is cynical.
"cynical: believing that people are motivated by self-interest"
In a free trade, capitalistic society, companies are by definition cynical, because the ones that are not go bankrupt.
> Apple is different because for nearly 40 years they have been honest and forthright and treating people different. Google says "don't be evil" and then goes out and does evil. Apple doesn't say it, they just don't do it.
I was with you until that last part. I would totally be on board with you if you say Google and Apple are both equally evil because they are looking after their own interest. The fact you think that google is doing evil and Apple is not makes me think you're a bit too far gone on the fanboy side.
>It's funny how Google advocates always "bash" apple for being "closed source" when this company ships the most popular Unix in the world... and all of their products, even the watch, are based on it.
Android ships far more units than OS X/iOS and their derivatives do.
I stand corrected. You appear to be technically correct that OS X is "Unix" [0] not Unix-like or a Unix clone like Linux-based operating systems. Legal precedent established in the SCO-linux cases [1] seems to confirm this technicality.
I think the distinction is pedantic, but I think we can agree that Android is the most widely shipped OS based on a Unix-like kernel.
And while technically unix, the command line tools which ship are so horribly out of date as to be almost unusable.... Try using sftp on a mac sometime, if you enjoy the sensation of bleeding from your eyes.
> Google says "don't be evil" and then goes out and does evil.
"Evil" such as serving you ads?
> Google's product is your private info.
Better ads targeting using your private info - not selling your private info to advertisers/governments. It's evident how much you distrust Google, but don't spread and allude to FUD.
> Apple is different because for nearly 40 years they have been honest and forthright and treating people different. Google says "don't be evil" and then goes out and does evil. Apple doesn't say it, they just don't do it.
Google and Apple behave similarly, as far as I can tell. TBH, I wouldn't call either company "evil," but they're both equally unfriendly to users, IMO. I'm curious why you think Apple is less "evil"?
> And it ignores the fundamental truth: Apple's product is really nice software sold in a hardware box. Google's product is your private info.
That's not a fundamental truth, and it's a false dichotomy. Apple's products are both software/hardware AND private info.
Everyone was happy to believe Google when they used to say their motto was, "Don't be evil," but not willing to believe the CEO of Apple, even though they've done a LOT to show they are working inline with his speech. I'm not saying Apple is a saintly corporation, but just assuming they are bad because they they COULD be bad comes off as paranoid more than insightful.
>Nobody can really tell what they are collecting, what they do with it and how much of it they share with third parties (including governments).
Yes, this could all be lies, but so could literally anything anyone says. Either you choose to live as a recluse in the woods with no technology, or you choose to trust at least some corporations. That might mean trusting your search engine, your cell phone company, your car manufacturer. Heck, you're trusting your ISP right now not to do a MITM attack on you. The natural conclusion is that you should use strong encryption in everything you do. At this point, there is one company spearheading this to get it into the hands of consumers who don't know any better.
Again, I realize Apple isn't blameless, but there's an awful lot about their recent actions to show they are making decisions based on what is best for the consumer. I think that's a good thing, and it's hard to imagine why someone would argue against it.
> All these companies are in it to win your private information,
The companies he Tim Cook described, that offer "free" services and data-mine/aggregate/sell your personal information to fund the business? Yes.
Apple has a vested interest in not collecting, analysing, aggregating and using the vast amounts of private information other companies do: they're seen by many as a premium brand, where you pay a bit more and get a better product/experience. Part of that is not getting "maybe you'd like X" emails from the App Store, or "Hey do you need a new printer for that Mac you just bought on Apple.com" type shit.
> and we are all prepared to give them some of our private information if what we get in return is worth it.
You might be. "We" are not all prepared to hand over private information.
Part of that is not getting "maybe you'd like X" emails from the App Store
I use a fair variety of google products on a couple of different platforms and have for years. Google has never sent me a suggest-sell email. They don't hide the fact that they're in the advertising and marketing business, but they're not that unsubtle.
Perhaps other people get suggest-sell emails from Google, but it's not something I've seen (or heard people complain about).
Yes, you did. You referenced the companies Cook was talking about, and he was primarily talking about Google. Google also operates the only software market that's close to the App Store in size, apart from the niche-market case of Steam.
One of my pet hates is people who imply something, then use "but I didn't LITERALLY write the exact words that say that". You can play that game forever - for instance, where in my first reply to you did I explicitly mention that you did say it? I never said you did.
Isn't implication a wonderfully deniable building-block of human communication?
Tim Cook specifically LITERALLY says that he is talking about multiple companies:
> I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information
> where in my first reply to you did I explicitly mention that you did say it
You were the one who brought Google into the conversation. I said Apple don't send spamvertising emails based on App Store purchases, because that's a very easy concept to understand how apple could use the private data they do have (i.e. my purchase/download history of iOS apps) as a revenue stream.
I think Google should be avoided whenever possible, but I'm not stupid enough to think they're the only company with skeevy data collection policies at the core of their business model.
The fact that you say you can't pick up that the major target in Cook's speech is Google simply means that either you're lying to save face, or you're incapable of picking up subtext in what people say. Cook's talking about 'data on our devices' and 'free services' and 'having your email, search history, and now family photos'. Who the hell do you think he's referring to here? Second in his firing line is Facebook, but it's clearly squarely aimed at the Goog, because Facebook has had your family photos for years.
And just in case you are enough of a naif that you missed that 'subtext', if it can be called that subtle, the article even explicitly highlights that it was a swipe against Google and spends a paragraph explaining why. Cook was the one who brought Google into the conversation, not me. He just didn't say the word 'google'.
And besides, what kind of counter is "these were the literal words" to someone whose argument is "there is more to communication than literal words"?
> Apple has a vested interest in not collecting, analysing
Do you seriously believe that? They are doing this non stop. Not a month goes by without my iPad requesting my iCloud password so it can back up my entire tablet, even though I've repeatedly declined to provide it.
They are collecting and analysing PII data all the time. They need it because it's an arms' race. They will only stop if compelled to do so by governments or by a privacy scandal.
> "We" are not all prepared to hand over private information.
Unless you tell me you never, ever use a search engine (not just Google, could be Bing or Yahoo or whatever), I am pretty sure you are in denial about that compromise. You are giving away private information all the time, you just don't realize it, or you are okay with the fact that "Getting good search results for this query is worth Google logging my IP".
> Not a month goes by without my iPad requesting my iCloud password so it can back up my entire tablet, even though I've repeatedly declined to provide it.
Apple prompts you to backup your data... so they must be analysing your data? Can I get whatever brand of space cakes you're snacking on?
> They need it because it's an arms' race
Google/etc are dependant on that information - without it they have almost no revenue at all.
Apple sells physical and digital products, and provides services. Almost all of these cost money to use, and the amount of data personal information required from the customer to provide those services is close to zero.
So tell me again why apple "needs" the data which they have repeatedly said they don't collect and don't want to collect?
> Unless you tell me you never, ever use a search engine
Yes, they say they properly anonymize and location-scrub this personal information before they store, aggregate and analyze it (and I have no reason to doubt that they're doing that, at least for their own use), but they are clearly collecting it. And if you're going to talk about things like vulnerability to government surveillance, just collecting it in the first place is more than enough to open that door.
> Not a month goes by without my iPad requesting my iCloud password so it can back up my entire tablet, even though I've repeatedly declined to provide it.
Settings -> iCloud -> Backup -> switch slider to off.
It's disingenuous to ask for it in the first place when one touts itself as a privacy advocate. Vast majority of users will do what they are told to do by default and Apple knows and exploits that.
Can one buy Apple products for cash, without supplying any personal information or identication?
Edit: This is a prerequisite for meaningful privacy. Plus having a pseudonymous account, funded by Bitcoins, for buying apps and stuff. Otherwise it's all based on trusting Apple, and so there's a single point of failure.
The Apple Store is extremely Tor-friendly, I find. There are no CAPTCHAs. In creating Apple IDs, there are no requests for personal information. Gift cards purchased with Bitcoins are recognized. I am gobsmacked! Maybe Apple is actually walking its privacy talk.
However, using ever-changing Tor exit IPs does trigger account locks, which require password reset. But that's arguably a feature, and not a bug.
I'd want an Apple account so that I can buy stuff. Maybe I could get by with open-source apps, but that would be a pain. Even if I take Tim Cook's speech at face value, there's the catch that Apple knows who I am. If Apple really wanted to make a point about being privacy-friendly, they would allow account creation via Tor, and accept Bitcoins.
Your needs are such that buying gift cards with cash is not secure/anonymous enough for you, yet it is too painful to use open-source software from outside the App Store?
I would suggest that this may be too small of a market to be commercially viable.
You may be right about open-source software being sufficient on Apple gear. But I wouldn't want to go through the hassle of buying gear anonymously, and then discover that I need something via Apple.
I'm sure that I represent a small market. But it's arguably a market that Apple must serve well for Tim Cook's claims about privacy to be credible.
I don't see how buying gift cards for cash in person is less secure than buying something online for bitcoin. Cash would seem the least identifying and/or trackable way of purchasing gift cards.
One can easily use VPN services and Tor to anonymize IP address. And one can easily anonymize Bitcoins using various mixing services via Tor. But in buying gift cards with cash, there is in-store video. There's also cellphone tracking, for those who are careless.
It's also, more cynically, trying to cast Apple's business model as a moral issue.
I mean, to be fair, Google does this too -- their emphasis on openness with Android, or "the next billion" with the low-cost, low-margin devices they enable are casting their business model as more moral than Apple's -- but advocating for the moral superiority of spending high-end money, as Cook is here, always strikes me as kind of gross.
(Also, when he implies that Google sells your data, he's just wrong. Google uses the heck out of it, but they don't sell it -- why would they? It's their competitive advantage, they don't want other people having direct access to it.)
Cynically, and hypocritically. Just checked, the Facebook app is still in the store. Apple has been happy to take the search payments from Google from the first iPhone. Astonishing how Cook's "morality" has no practical implications that require his company to do anything.
I agree with what you said here but I think that when Google, in the pursuit of their primary revenue stream, sells an ad targeted at you, they can only do that because of what they know about you and your search history. That is very close to the same thing as selling your data is it not?
No, it's very different. If I'm concerned about my privacy, I'm concerned about who knows stuff about me.
Google knows a bunch of stuff about their customers inherently (because their customers have all their email on Google servers, do Google searches, etc.), so Google customers have already decided they trust Google with that information.
If Google were selling it, they'd be passing it along to other organizations that users haven't explicitly trusted. That'd be bad. But they don't do that -- they use their information to show you things based on what they know, with targeted ads; that might bother you from an aesthetic/anti-capitalist perspective, but isn't an extra concern from a privacy perspective.
(Interesting fun fact: You know who does actively sell your information? Your bank, for just about any big bank.)
(1) Google also puts ads and other little tracking widgets (google analytics, G+ social buttons, etc.) all over the web, gathering massive amounts of information about people’s browsing habits unrelated to any direct customer relationship or informed consent.
(2) Use of Google search does not at all imply that a customer wants all of their searches to be associated with their identity, processed, stored indefinitely, used to build a comprehensive dossier to better target advertising on unrelated pages, or handed over to nation-state spooks who come asking. It’s not at all clear that most customers understand what information they’re handing over or what can be done with it when they use services like search.
[Yes, plenty of other ad networks, analytics companies, social media services, etc. do the same thing, and plenty of other types of companies (e.g. the banks you mention) and government agencies also build permanent profiles of people based on whatever scraps of data they can; this is not only a Google problem. It’s creepy when anyone does it, which is why there should be better regulatory oversight ensuring that customers know what data is collected and how it is used, restricting certain types of data aggregation and customer profiling, and placing limits on how long various types of data can be kept.]
Re 1 - I agree that is by a mile the most problematic part of Google's business. It's not a problem that Google knows what's in the emails I store on their servers -- of course they do, I put them there -- but it is problematic if they know I go to www.controversialsite.com when they should have no reason to.
But the implication there is that Google's most privacy-invasive product, by a mile, is Google Analytics, which doesn't really help Cook's case in any meaningful way, because that has nothing to do with the Google services that compete with Apple.
Analytics uses first-party cookies for the site's domain, not your google cookie(s). And you'll have to take them at their word, but they don't combine it with some IP address trickiness or whatever (though that would be a pretty bad idea if you want decent profiles anyway): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245?hl=en
That is just a Terms Of Service change away. Such legal changes aren't even unlikely: Google already changed their Terms of Service in the past to allow them to combine information from separate sites and services, which they didn't explicitly claim to do before[1].
The 'reassurances' provided in Google's Terms of Service don't mean jack shit when they have the power to change the terms in the future to whatever they want.
That would only work going forward. You wouldn't be able to merge the data retroactively.
And why would they do that is the question. Again, since they don't serve google cookies on analytics this would be virtually useless. An IP address isn't much to go on. Even a 5% misidentification rate would lead to horribly polluted data about users very quickly.
No, because the relationship is between Google and you. The advertiser doesn't know the criteria that leads Google to show the ad to you, they just pay Google to know what they are doing and deliver relevant leads.
I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.
That google found those keywords in some poor souls email, and I don't have access to the email, doesn't make it any less the case that google is selling that poor souls info to me.
Edit: New policy. I won't respond to responses when my comment is negative. HN is rife with people who are just down voting anything based on ideology, or in a lot of cases, straight up hatred and bigotry. (IT's not question Google zealots hate Apple, and are irrational in this.) I won't be the queer in your game of smear the queer. I don't care how rational the response is.
I'm not saying you downvoted me, just that I'm done putting effort in when it's the comments are literally rendered unreadable and censored by people who don't care about rational discourse. So why participate?
That doesn't seem all that different than advertising in the yellow pages to me. You have to ask the customer how they heard about you, but if they mention the yellow pages, you're pretty sure you know what they were looking for, because you picked the section(s) you advertised in.
To my knowledge, Google doesn't tell you where the keyword was found, or even if it was an exact keyword match or something they deemed similar enough to show (but I'm by no means an expert in Adwords).
At some point you just have to accept that when you call a plumber, the plumber going to have a pretty good base to assume you need a plumber, and this is releasing some information to them. Without that, communication would be impossible.
> I know exactly the criteria google uses to show the ad to someone, because that's what I buy when I buy keywords.
No, you know exactly the criteria Google requests from you when you buy the ad. That's most likely a subset of the criteria Google uses to display the ad (which can include things like the past performance of your ads / of similar ads, in different contexts, for different kinds of users and probably all sorts of stuff I'm not thinking of).
No, if they sell your data, the recipient can user it for many purposes, including redistributing. If they use your days to target adds, the external customer can't do anything else with it.
How do you define "sell"? Adsense and Adwords - can very well be argued as selling the distilled gist mined from troves of data collected from your search history, email, photos, android app usage.
>You're arguing over semantics. Selling a product (ads) that is a direct result of having that data is basically selling that data.
For some definition of "basically" that means "not whatsoever". Selling involves exchanging money for goods or services with another party (to paraphrase Homer Simpson).
Perhaps a privacy advocate should be wondering about the 'sniff test' of the speech. What does “Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security” mean? That there's a serious argument that less privacy is more security? Aren't they functionally the same thing in this context - 'security' here is about maintaining privacy.
It's also a bit rich that Cook is talking about other entities gobbling up your data for themselves, when Apple is the epitome of the 'walled garden'. Apparently being in control of your own information is only what Apple wants if it's concomitant with their control of your information.
Cook isn't being morally upstanding here. He's just reframing his company's position to make the other guy look bad. It's the traditional pattern of hide your weaknesses and expose those of your competition.
I don't know, it looks pretty obviously like he's talking his book. I care about privacy, but Cook using it to sell me Apple products is a turn-off to me.
As long as Apple heavily relies on closed source technology I'm fairly skeptical about their commitment.
Additionally being a US based company all it takes is a friendly government agent showing up and I'm sure they'll hand over stuff without putting up too much of a fight
I'd also guess that they do use cookies for their website and pay for web based advertising (thus being an enabler). Siri also makes me rather uncomfortable.
Don't get me wrong, better privacy is an important issue and if Apple sees it as a potential competitive advantage that's pretty good (as it'll force others to improve there as well). I'll be very interested in seeing how much they push this as a general strategy.
[sadly I'd argue it's not really all that great of an idea because if push comes to shove most people will readily give up privacy for convenience (imo)]
> “I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,”
That is just really, really, REALLY RICH, coming from the company who's behind this kind of shit: http://i.imgur.com/1lGp7ps.jpg
Yep, to turn off ad-tracking, you have to go to... Settings... then 'General'... and then... About. Wait, "About"? Yes, "About", then "Advertising" ... and then do "Limit Ad Tracking". "Limit Ad Tracking", what a wonderfully clear label huh!
Of course that's coming to you form the individual who likes to give lofty speeches about how he and Steve Jobs led in 'advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees' [1]. Because let's please just forget about how Apple had its part in collusion over hiring policies [2].
“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”
This is a great strategy to win the hearts and minds of privacy advocates like me and take shots at companies like Google at the same time.