Apple sells hardware differentiated by integrated software for premium pricing. They want to build better and more expensive products through superior design and quality control. Collecting and analyzing personal data isn't the most important thing for their business. They might see more benefit by eschewing personal data collection and marketing a privacy-focused message, which they seem to be doing.
In contrast, Google and Facebook are companies that sell advertising. The value they can offer to publishers and advertisers completely relies on how well they know their users. Their competitive moat involves collection of proprietary data to continuously improve their products. These are clear incentives to be sticky and greedy with your information, but also to keep it private and proprietary for their own sake.
With these incentives in mind, I more readily trust Apple when it says that it will not collect my data compared to data conglomerates, and Apple hasn't done anything to aggressively betray that idea in its history (to my knowledge). Combined with the technical security advantages of iOS, I'm inclined to believe Apple products to be the least-bad option for the security-minded today.
First: Move out of Google and Facebook. In particular email. It's a good idea as they can lock you out for nothing without explanations. They've been doing this a lot recently. You are not famous so a twitter mob won't help you.
Second: Since most pages out there have trackers from these companies, install Ad Nauseam extension to not just block tracking but click on everything in the background. This will ruin the information they gather about you with noise.
Ad Nauseam is a curious recommendation. While it devalues you individually, it also consumes bandwidth locally and remotely. Feels like accelerating the arms race.
I do like Apple's approach to privacy. A lot. And I love their phones. While their PC hardware is still pretty, it's getting more-and-more outdated and overpriced. But that's no longer their focus, so hey.
And indeed, Apple seems to handle privacy well, in practice. I've managed to create pseudonymous accounts at Apple's online store, and fund them with anonymized Bitcoin. And I've managed to make digital purchases.
However, I haven't tested buying physical devices, for pickup in meatspace. I wonder if they'd require official ID, or just proof of purchase. Anyone know?
Hardware-wise, they are top! Privacy-wise, they've done plenty, but there is significant improvemens to be made!
I appreciate the alert when an app tries to grab my contacts/calendar/location.
On the other hand I DO NOT appreciate, when an app (e.g. British Airways) always informs Facebook, Google Analytics, tens of other trackers, that I am using the app, and I am left in the no-mercy of those folks, and Apple is not helping me to protect my privacy.
This is why an iPhone is only good when it's jailbroken (replace hosts file, install ProtectMyPrivacy, install Firewall IP -yes it works on 10.2-)
The last time I went to pick up a product (AirPods) it required government issued photo ID (Australian driver's license), even though I had the Apple Store app which made the purchase installed on my phone.
I am not sure if one can trust any 'don't be evil' pledges. With Apple products one is often required to use the appleid - and this can be used for tracking purposes. Also Apple is also a media company (iTunes among other things) so it's not just a pure hardware vendor. They too sit on a big heap of user data - beware. Also they are required to comply with local regulations - and these may not be compatible with your high expectations on matters of privacy and confidentiality.
I agree with this reasoning (although I'm not particularly privacy minded, and prefer Android and most Google products to iOS and iCloud).
The older tech companies like Apple and Microsoft have built business models with a different set of incentives around user data. Google, and particularly Facebook's, business models entirely rely on monetising user data.
My personal 'ranking' of a companies incentives to respect privacy is something like:
1. Microsoft
2. Apple
3. Amazon
4. Google
5. Facebook
Obviously this ranking is very debatable, but I agree business model incentives are a pretty good heuristic.
Apple is building the tools needed to better invade people's privacy, and those tools will proliferate, regardless of how responsibly Apple uses those tools themselves.
The pattern has repeated itself so many times throughout history. Technology developed with the best of intentions ends up getting used for bad.
I'm happy Apple is at least trying hard to deal with privacy but honestly I don't think they are doing enough, at least for me.
For example, I don't really want to give most apps constant access to my photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don't have a whole lot of choice if I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..
I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo. Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.
As for the Camera I don't give any of those apps access to the camera because I don't trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.
Mic access is more problematic. I don't want any of them to have mic access when I'm not using the mic function directly but I can't talk to my friends who use all those services to call me if I don't give the apps mic access.
I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they'd handle these issues in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases. Don't let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app, and then just giving the result to the app.
Apps won’t need to ask for permission to your entire library - the Photo picker will just appear, and only user selected photos will be available to the app.
On the iOS 11 GM at the moment, Facebook still seems to need access to my entire library. So perhaps it is only for apps that link against iOS 11. Guess we’ll see soon.
I agree with this but just so you know mic and camera access are two different things and iOS users get two different prompts if an app wants camera AND mic access
Thinking about it some more. For Camera and Mic they could have the option to "ask the user" every time and revoke that permission if the top is not the front app after a minute or so. That would at least prevent using the camera and mic when the user has not recently given permission. Whether people would use it or not I don't know. I would.
That's actually quite a sensible proposal. I wish the implement it.
I often asked myself what happens when I give an app access to my photos. Can that app upload all my photos to their servers? The same question for things like calendar, address book, health data etc.
The apps are presenting their own UIs showing all the photos. They also have options to upload all the photos in the background. They clearly get permission to access all the photos.
Going to settings doesn't help
1) Giving an app permission to access the photos and then revoke it when I'm done doesn't prevent the app from accessing as many photos as it pleases until I revoke access. In the time it would take for me to give an app access, select a photo, and then revoke the app could easily have looked at 10s or 100s of photos.
Add some ML in there for their ad targeting
2) With the Mic off I can't receive calls in any of the messaging apps. If iOS asked each time then that issue would go away but as it is I need to leave on mic support or miss calls. I suppose I could miss the first call, turn on mic support, return the call, turn off mic support.
Still, I'd argue if Apple wanted to be even more serious about privacy they wouldn't allow apps to have unrestricted access to the mic as they do because it makes the burden of trying to prevent spying pretty cumbersome.
I think you mis-understand how iOS privacy controls work. An app doesn't get to 'see all your photos' just because you grant photo access, you still have to select which photos to put in the app. Same goes for camera, that just let's the app pull up the camera interface, not be able to access it 24/7 for whatever purpose they want. Same with the mic.
The apps do get permission to see all photos. How else would facebook or google photos automatically upload all your photos. Both apps have the option to do this. It requires no extra permissions on your photos and you don't have to select anything. It just requires giving permission once to "photos"
Whenever an app asks for access to Photos to save an image or to read a photo, it gets access to the entire camera roll (all photos). So it can certainly upload your entire photo library someplace if it wants to, subject to foreground usage time, network speed and background activity (limited by iOS).
Compared to that workflow, if you open the stock/official photos app and use the share sheet to share one or more photos with a specific app, then it would get only the selected photo(s).
True but incomplete. FB and similar make money on bulk collection. They do care but mostly in the aggregate. More data is directly related to more ad revenue.
I don't really follow how that's something that Apple needs to change. You either want to use the apps or you don't. If you don't, just don't download them or don't give them access. If your friends absolutely have to use the apps, then they clearly don't care about the same things you do and you need to convince them to use something else that you are ok with using.
I guess I just don't understand why Apple needs to put things in place to allow you to work with companies you don't want to work with.
Free Scenario:
I install a photo sharing app. I use it to only post photos that I take while going on hikes or of my food. Those are always in an Album called "foodpics" or similar, and every time I open their app, I select the "foodpics" folder, then the image inside of it and then go through the app's upload flow.
Why should the photo app get access to the rest of my library of photos, like the ones in "business receipts" or "my son" that I would never upload to said photo sharing site?
Sometimes you want to use the app, but you don't want it to have a world-view of your phone. In a perfect world the photo sharing app should only get access to the individual photos that I choose to share with it (either through the Photos app or an OS-level file selector)
>I guess I just don't understand why Apple needs to put things in place to allow you to work with companies you don't want to work with.
What's not to understand? Apple is selling you the phone. Its in Apple's interest to put as many features on the phone as potential buyers might be interested in. Allowing the owner's of a device to control access to different parts of a device rather than 3rd party software is not just good business practice, its common sense.
Apple chose to let the China government into their China data center and Google chose to leave the country instead. So not so simple on who you trust. Personally I trust Google more as they are just a lot better at keeping things secure, imo. Plus governments getting into data is a bigger deal to me than a targeted ad. But it is a personal decision.
"A Local Chinese Government Will Oversee Apple’s New iCloud Data Center"
At least one company is "trying" keep my photos private. The other day Google Photo told my wife it had prepared an album for our trip to SFO. We were surprised because she already disabled Geo-tagging but whataya know... Google still figured it out!
If you have location enabled on your phone, Google appears to cross reference your location with your photo timestamps to work out where you were. I know this because when I import my DSLR images to Google Photos it estimates the location, usually very accurately.
I've also seen it geotag things based upon the content of the image alone.
I went to the photo store not long ago and had dozens of rolls of negatives scanned, from a vacation to Europe 20 years ago. I uploaded them into Google Photos and it geotagged many of them automatically.
They have a public API that does the same, it detects landmarks in images and can give you a lat/long position for it as well as a confidence score.
I discovered the same last week. I made a trip to Amsterdam some 11 years ago, and since then uploaded my entire photo library to Google Photos. Last week I was playing around and searched "Amsterdam" in Google Photos, whaddaya know, (most of my) photos from Amsterdam showed up, at least those with discernible features/buildings/landmarks.
Google Photos uses ML to tag photos and this feature released amidst much fanfare at Google I/O a couple of years ago. They don't need location data to geotag photos anymore.
They took 126 million geotagged images from the web, bined them into 26,000 squares, and trained a neural net to predict which square on the earth an image was taken in. That's very poor resolution, but if you see that 20 images taken around the same time are tagged as the square that contains San Francisco, you can be pretty sure they all happened during a trip to San Francisco.
Thanks for explaining one possible method. It could still mean Google is tracking location "without consent". I suppose it depends on whether they use that location data for anything other than Google Photos.
That is true as well. I will buy something at Costco and I will see ads related to that. Book a hotel and see ads on Facebook (let alone Google). Problem is not the fact that I am looking for these things but the amount of information they steal without my consent.
Privacy is one of those things I can't tangibly describe why I like it, but it just feels good to know that nothing is being saved, even in contrast to just targeting you for ads and nothing else.
I like it because of this: imagine you're having an intimate conversation with your best friend. In the room silently sit representatives from Google, Facebook, and your government. Before you speak, you (sub)consciously transform your thoughts and phrasing taking into account both the theory of mind of your friend, and those other organizations. This necessarily has low-level overhead, and results in a less-intimate conversation.
Privacy means you only have to care about communicating with the person with whom you're communicating. Organations with incomprehensible motives are cut out of the loop. You can be yourself, not a self-censoring corporate-approved robot.
We generally speak of organizations, companies, and governments that are seeking the penetrate the veil of individual privacy. And I think that leads people to forget that these entities are made up of people. And people can, and do, do bad things.
A soft example is Snowden stating that NSA operators regularly pass around intercepted nude photo/video from people who had their privacy unjustly compromised: "These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.." But the particularly disconcerting issue is that this information can be used against individuals. This article from the EFF highlights the FBI's actions against MLK:
That letter was the FBI, posing as a disillusioned black supporter, detailing various embarrassing information that had been collected on MLK and encouraging him to commit suicide -- stating that it would all be published otherwise. And these couple of examples are only stuff that's being done by the "good guys." Information can, and will, be leaked, stolen, traded, and so on. One can only imagine the sort of things the "bad guys" could cook up.
A few things have struck me really strong on Apple's stand and implementation on protecting users' privacy:
1. Though it's understandable that Apple earns money primarily by selling hardware, it's sort of amusing and alarming at the same time that a proprietary almost-closed-source software company is focusing on protecting and preserving privacy whereas partially open source platforms competing with Apple seem to be nowhere close on this aspect. Do any of the Android forks try to do as much as Apple does for privacy right out of the box (something a non-technical lay person could get)?
2. It's abundantly clear that a lot of thought has gone into the foundations of a design focused on protecting privacy and in creating silos of information in/with different SDKs and features.
3. It's a bit unclear to me as to why Health data is stored encrypted in iCloud whereas messages aren't. Is there a distinction here between iCloud sync and iCloud backups? The documentation on messages suggests turning off iCloud backup as a protective measure.
4. To me, the weakest link in the ecosystem seems to be third party apps, where Apple relies more on them adhering to the developer guidelines and on publishing a privacy policy.
Regarding your first point, it's difficult to implement some security schemes at the operating system level alone. With full vertical control of the product, you can have nice things like secure enclaves and de-facto hardware cryptography acceleration.
A lot of the features would be very difficult to implement in Android without cooperating hardware, and hardware is notoriously expensive to get right and scale up. Projects like neo900 and Purism regularly encounter delays, unexpected costs, and pricing issues. It's really tough.
On a broader note, people are spending more and more time in data-hungry apps anyway, which can send almost anything they want to the network. This is sure to chip at any device-level security, pushing it towards irrelevance. I wish I had a log entry every time an app used the location service on my phone along with a database containing a history of Internet-transacted data.
Thanks for the explanation on the Android side. It still seems weird that nobody wants to take this up as a USP for their devices (referring to non-Google entities).
> On a broader note, people are spending more and more time in data-hungry apps anyway, which can send almost anything they want to the network. This is sure to chip at any device-level security, pushing it towards irrelevance. I wish I had a log entry every time an app used the location service on my phone along with a database containing a history of Internet-transacted data.
I've long wished for network access permission on iOS, allowing the user to decide which apps can never connect to any networks. To reduce the total attack surface, I'd want to keep many apps (especially games) running only within their sandboxes and having access to only the data they create/generate on-device and no other external resource/server.
AFAIK, Android has had this even in the days of permission requests at app install time. I don't know if granular control is available on this from Android 6 onwards.
It seems like Apple could read them in iCloud. I have to admit this is a guess based on the wording on the privacy page. The privacy page still has the same text as two days ago (quoting an excerpt here):
> Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data when it’s in transit between devices. So unlike other companies’ messaging services, Apple doesn’t scan your communications, and we wouldn’t be able to comply with a wiretap order even if we wanted to. While we do back up iMessage and SMS messages for your convenience using iCloud Backup, you can turn it off whenever you want.
Compare that with what it says under the Health section of the same page (quoted excerpt):
> And any Health data backed up to iCloud is encrypted both in transit and on our servers.
Apple's approach to privacy also includes being a partner in PRISM, a fact which they chose to vigorously deny as false allegations until it was proven to be true.
Every story about Apple and privacy chooses to omit thus huge piece of info.
Why should anybody trust them now? What has changed to make anybody believe they aren't still lying about privacy?
PRISM is a system for dispatching FISA 702 directives, which are the documents containing "selectors" (search queries) pursuant to a court-approved FISA 702 certification. It is to search warrants what Stripe is to credit card authorizations.
"Not" being a partner in PRISM doesn't mean much; it just means you're legally obligated to handle that paperwork by hand. Like every other company in the country, you're still required to comply with a valid 702 directive.
That has nothing to do with the questions that I posed. Apple being part of PRISM is what I referred to. Not the nature of the program. The intentional lying about it. Why should anybody trust them?
“We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order,” stated Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling.
If their technology is built such that even they themselves cannot peer into the inner workings of your content, what good is their association with PRISM?
But it's not. It says "encrypted when sent and, in most cases, when stored on our servers". Even if encrypted at rest that doesn't mean they can't decrypt it.
The calls and messages should be end-to-end encrypted but they are in control of the PKI so they could probably eavesdrop if they wanted.
I wish the EFF still made those "Who has your back" infographics, they were really helpful if you wanted to find out which companies respected your data both online and in the courts. But IMO Apple is the only large multinational corporation that is actually taking steps to protect my privacy so I'm way more inclined to trust them with my personal information. Can't say the same for Google or others.
Readit News
In contrast, Google and Facebook are companies that sell advertising. The value they can offer to publishers and advertisers completely relies on how well they know their users. Their competitive moat involves collection of proprietary data to continuously improve their products. These are clear incentives to be sticky and greedy with your information, but also to keep it private and proprietary for their own sake.
With these incentives in mind, I more readily trust Apple when it says that it will not collect my data compared to data conglomerates, and Apple hasn't done anything to aggressively betray that idea in its history (to my knowledge). Combined with the technical security advantages of iOS, I'm inclined to believe Apple products to be the least-bad option for the security-minded today.
First: Move out of Google and Facebook. In particular email. It's a good idea as they can lock you out for nothing without explanations. They've been doing this a lot recently. You are not famous so a twitter mob won't help you.
Second: Since most pages out there have trackers from these companies, install Ad Nauseam extension to not just block tracking but click on everything in the background. This will ruin the information they gather about you with noise.
https://adnauseam.io/
And indeed, Apple seems to handle privacy well, in practice. I've managed to create pseudonymous accounts at Apple's online store, and fund them with anonymized Bitcoin. And I've managed to make digital purchases.
However, I haven't tested buying physical devices, for pickup in meatspace. I wonder if they'd require official ID, or just proof of purchase. Anyone know?
I appreciate the alert when an app tries to grab my contacts/calendar/location.
On the other hand I DO NOT appreciate, when an app (e.g. British Airways) always informs Facebook, Google Analytics, tens of other trackers, that I am using the app, and I am left in the no-mercy of those folks, and Apple is not helping me to protect my privacy.
This is why an iPhone is only good when it's jailbroken (replace hosts file, install ProtectMyPrivacy, install Firewall IP -yes it works on 10.2-)
The older tech companies like Apple and Microsoft have built business models with a different set of incentives around user data. Google, and particularly Facebook's, business models entirely rely on monetising user data.
My personal 'ranking' of a companies incentives to respect privacy is something like:
1. Microsoft 2. Apple 3. Amazon 4. Google 5. Facebook
Obviously this ranking is very debatable, but I agree business model incentives are a pretty good heuristic.
The pattern has repeated itself so many times throughout history. Technology developed with the best of intentions ends up getting used for bad.
For example, I don't really want to give most apps constant access to my photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don't have a whole lot of choice if I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..
I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo. Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.
As for the Camera I don't give any of those apps access to the camera because I don't trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.
Mic access is more problematic. I don't want any of them to have mic access when I'm not using the mic function directly but I can't talk to my friends who use all those services to call me if I don't give the apps mic access.
I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they'd handle these issues in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases. Don't let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app, and then just giving the result to the app.
Apps won’t need to ask for permission to your entire library - the Photo picker will just appear, and only user selected photos will be available to the app.
On the iOS 11 GM at the moment, Facebook still seems to need access to my entire library. So perhaps it is only for apps that link against iOS 11. Guess we’ll see soon.
They could allow an app in their app store to provide this functionality to users who want it.
I often asked myself what happens when I give an app access to my photos. Can that app upload all my photos to their servers? The same question for things like calendar, address book, health data etc.
I don't think this is true though. From the code I've seen you only get returned the single UIPhoto the user chose.
also remember you can revoke permissions at any time via Settings.
Going to settings doesn't help
1) Giving an app permission to access the photos and then revoke it when I'm done doesn't prevent the app from accessing as many photos as it pleases until I revoke access. In the time it would take for me to give an app access, select a photo, and then revoke the app could easily have looked at 10s or 100s of photos.
Add some ML in there for their ad targeting
2) With the Mic off I can't receive calls in any of the messaging apps. If iOS asked each time then that issue would go away but as it is I need to leave on mic support or miss calls. I suppose I could miss the first call, turn on mic support, return the call, turn off mic support.
Still, I'd argue if Apple wanted to be even more serious about privacy they wouldn't allow apps to have unrestricted access to the mic as they do because it makes the burden of trying to prevent spying pretty cumbersome.
Compared to that workflow, if you open the stock/official photos app and use the share sheet to share one or more photos with a specific app, then it would get only the selected photo(s).
Mark is definitely not sitting around thinking "ayyyyy what's Gregg up to?"
I guess I just don't understand why Apple needs to put things in place to allow you to work with companies you don't want to work with.
Why should the photo app get access to the rest of my library of photos, like the ones in "business receipts" or "my son" that I would never upload to said photo sharing site?
Sometimes you want to use the app, but you don't want it to have a world-view of your phone. In a perfect world the photo sharing app should only get access to the individual photos that I choose to share with it (either through the Photos app or an OS-level file selector)
What's not to understand? Apple is selling you the phone. Its in Apple's interest to put as many features on the phone as potential buyers might be interested in. Allowing the owner's of a device to control access to different parts of a device rather than 3rd party software is not just good business practice, its common sense.
"A Local Chinese Government Will Oversee Apple’s New iCloud Data Center"
http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/apple-china-icloud-data-center...
I went to the photo store not long ago and had dozens of rolls of negatives scanned, from a vacation to Europe 20 years ago. I uploaded them into Google Photos and it geotagged many of them automatically.
They have a public API that does the same, it detects landmarks in images and can give you a lat/long position for it as well as a confidence score.
https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-landmarks
They took 126 million geotagged images from the web, bined them into 26,000 squares, and trained a neural net to predict which square on the earth an image was taken in. That's very poor resolution, but if you see that 20 images taken around the same time are tagged as the square that contains San Francisco, you can be pretty sure they all happened during a trip to San Francisco.
Reminds me of https://geoguessr.com
Privacy means you only have to care about communicating with the person with whom you're communicating. Organations with incomprehensible motives are cut out of the loop. You can be yourself, not a self-censoring corporate-approved robot.
We generally speak of organizations, companies, and governments that are seeking the penetrate the veil of individual privacy. And I think that leads people to forget that these entities are made up of people. And people can, and do, do bad things.
A soft example is Snowden stating that NSA operators regularly pass around intercepted nude photo/video from people who had their privacy unjustly compromised: "These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.." But the particularly disconcerting issue is that this information can be used against individuals. This article from the EFF highlights the FBI's actions against MLK:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...
That letter was the FBI, posing as a disillusioned black supporter, detailing various embarrassing information that had been collected on MLK and encouraging him to commit suicide -- stating that it would all be published otherwise. And these couple of examples are only stuff that's being done by the "good guys." Information can, and will, be leaked, stolen, traded, and so on. One can only imagine the sort of things the "bad guys" could cook up.
1. Though it's understandable that Apple earns money primarily by selling hardware, it's sort of amusing and alarming at the same time that a proprietary almost-closed-source software company is focusing on protecting and preserving privacy whereas partially open source platforms competing with Apple seem to be nowhere close on this aspect. Do any of the Android forks try to do as much as Apple does for privacy right out of the box (something a non-technical lay person could get)?
2. It's abundantly clear that a lot of thought has gone into the foundations of a design focused on protecting privacy and in creating silos of information in/with different SDKs and features.
3. It's a bit unclear to me as to why Health data is stored encrypted in iCloud whereas messages aren't. Is there a distinction here between iCloud sync and iCloud backups? The documentation on messages suggests turning off iCloud backup as a protective measure.
4. To me, the weakest link in the ecosystem seems to be third party apps, where Apple relies more on them adhering to the developer guidelines and on publishing a privacy policy.
See here for details: https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf
A lot of the features would be very difficult to implement in Android without cooperating hardware, and hardware is notoriously expensive to get right and scale up. Projects like neo900 and Purism regularly encounter delays, unexpected costs, and pricing issues. It's really tough.
On a broader note, people are spending more and more time in data-hungry apps anyway, which can send almost anything they want to the network. This is sure to chip at any device-level security, pushing it towards irrelevance. I wish I had a log entry every time an app used the location service on my phone along with a database containing a history of Internet-transacted data.
> On a broader note, people are spending more and more time in data-hungry apps anyway, which can send almost anything they want to the network. This is sure to chip at any device-level security, pushing it towards irrelevance. I wish I had a log entry every time an app used the location service on my phone along with a database containing a history of Internet-transacted data.
I've long wished for network access permission on iOS, allowing the user to decide which apps can never connect to any networks. To reduce the total attack surface, I'd want to keep many apps (especially games) running only within their sandboxes and having access to only the data they create/generate on-device and no other external resource/server.
AFAIK, Android has had this even in the days of permission requests at app install time. I don't know if granular control is available on this from Android 6 onwards.
https://copperhead.co/android/store
> Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data when it’s in transit between devices. So unlike other companies’ messaging services, Apple doesn’t scan your communications, and we wouldn’t be able to comply with a wiretap order even if we wanted to. While we do back up iMessage and SMS messages for your convenience using iCloud Backup, you can turn it off whenever you want.
Compare that with what it says under the Health section of the same page (quoted excerpt):
> And any Health data backed up to iCloud is encrypted both in transit and on our servers.
Every story about Apple and privacy chooses to omit thus huge piece of info.
Why should anybody trust them now? What has changed to make anybody believe they aren't still lying about privacy?
"Not" being a partner in PRISM doesn't mean much; it just means you're legally obligated to handle that paperwork by hand. Like every other company in the country, you're still required to comply with a valid 702 directive.
“We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order,” stated Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling.
http://www.cheatsheet.com/technology/is-apple-lying-about-it...
One thing we're certain of, however, is that Apple has the signing keys. They also encrypt their firmware and even other apps to hide how they work.
The calls and messages should be end-to-end encrypted but they are in control of the PKI so they could probably eavesdrop if they wanted.