Apple's Cook Says Circumventing App Store Would Harm User Privacy
source link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/22/04/12/1653234/apples-cook-says-circumventing-app-store-would-harm-user-privacy?sbsrc=md
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Of course this is the wrong framing, so it gets key points wrong. Allowing third party app stores won't force bad apps onto anyone's phone; it will still require affirmative steps by the user to allow those apps on their phones. People who want to trust Apple to look after their privacy and security will be free to do so. People who don't trust Apple, or trust some third party provider more, will be free to trust those people instead. People who just want apps that Apple has decided to exclude for whatever reason would be free to take a risk and install them.
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I don't think framing matters much in most religions... sorry... couldn't help myself (pauses his ipod to post).
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You're thinking like... well, you're actually thinking and analyzing the issue.
Many Apple users like myself don't want to think about it. I own Apple stuff because I don't want to waste my time thinking about it. I just want to trust it blindly and move on with my other daily tasks (Elastic Search development ATM, etc.) and fun.
I'll take Tim Cook's nanny state on this issue because I trust him on the privacy issue as much as a reasonable, paranoid person can trust a CEO of a trillion dollar company (not much, but more than not at all). And that trust (especially in my illusion of iOS's superior security) is easier when my phone's walled garden's underlying ecosystem (iOS devices) is never exposed to a non-critical risk like this (allowing these types of apps).
There's Android OS for that. I guess it's where "separate but equal" actually makes sense? You want a white phone - pretentious, has an easier path to use, full of "walled garden privilege" and believing it's superior? Go iPhone. You want a black phone, that works hard and gets the job done like iOS, but is definitely different in ultimately cosmetic, meaningless ways - and may have some trust issues and shady characters lurking in its dark corners? Go Android. (I can't believe I'm posting this crap... LOL).
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I use an iPhone because Apple's the only company still making phone-sized phones (though I suppose I'm in the minority on that), and for iMessage. The walled garden aspect is just annoying. If Apple finally did enable real sideloading (not that crap it has now where you've gotta use a leaked enterprise certificate or self-sign the app every 7 days), the first thing I'd do is install Kodi and RetroArch.
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What do you mean "phone sized"? Like the wall mounted hand-crank phone or the original suitcase phone?
Anyways Android comes in everything from flip phones to phablets.
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don't get me wrong, I love Kodi and watch virtually everything on it via my firestick but for my wife who watches stuff on her ipad often, sideloading kodi is not worth the headache (not to mention I find it not optimal for a touch interface regardless of skin choice) via some certificate and I've found that "infuse" for iOS is a pretty solid polished Kodi replacement though its connectivity to various protocols is a tad lacking compared to even an old version of Kodi but it's good enough for her...
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If Apple were forced to allow 3rd party app stores, but you chose not to use one of them, it would change how you use your device how exactly?
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If Apple were forced to allow 3rd party app stores, but you chose not to use one of them, it would change how you use your device how exactly?
When has that ever been the case?
I have an Xbox, but I want to play a PS5 game. I'm now forced to buy a PS5 in order to play that game. I didn't want a PS5.
OK too extreme. I'm a Linux user. I need to run a Windows only program. Now I have to install Windows and all that jazz. (VM, dual partitions, whatever).
Too extreme? OK, try again.
I have a PC running Windows. I get
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Who was forcing you to get those games in your analogy? I think your analogy assumes those games would all be available in the single store.
If multiple stores having different, though sometimes overlapping, product availability is so bad, let's just ban all retail stores and force everyone to shop exclusively at Amazon.
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Sure. But the point is that if you're happy with the way Apple is running things, you'd be free to keep it. It would even be the default, so you'd get exactly what you have now with zero effort. But someone who wanted an app that Apple decided to exclude from the app store would be able to run it rather than being stuck.
Many of those apps are probably garbage and would cause the exact problems Tim Cook is talking about. But the real sticking point is that Apple is using its role as gatekeeper to deman
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This doesn't force you to think about it don't go into the setting, don't turn on side loading, don't think about it. You will only turn on side loading if you are already thinking about it.
You maybe right most apple users won't think about it and will not bother, side loading. The only time this might happen is if you its a major must have title that you trust. The developer can always offer you a version that is 43% more expensive to cover the apple tax. That's right in order to make the same amount of mo
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And the problem is that by turning off your brain, you fall prey to the things you're trying to avoid... and get charged with it anyway. The privacy labels are a lie. Apple sells your privacy, just like Google (see their iad selling dept), their apps gather just as much info (if not more because you don't want prompts to confirm.) Malware gets on the store, and there cannot be as many eyes on it because... how could companies (or you) look for malware? They can't, you don't have access to the executabl
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That is all very well but what about the non-techie who just clicks through everything, i.e. everyone who has not got a/. user ID. iOS is great for that at the moment because almost everything is off by default, there is vetting of apps plus they can get pulled for bad behaviour.
Out of those who got an iPhone or iOS device knowing about the restrictions it came with, who wants lots of alternative app stores and payment methods? I certainly do not, this is one of the positive features that attracted me to i
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But it's not safe. Privacy is equally 'free' to app developers (linked elsewhere in the comments). Malware (and other non permitted apps) gets into the store with an alarming frequency considering theres human "gatekeepers".
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You are both wrong. The problem is that App Developers won't offer clean versions of Apps. I've made this point in the past. Go to bankofamerica.com and check how many trackers are on its home page. Doubleclick.net, and a bunch of others. A whole bunch. Bank of America is selling tracking on visitors to its page, what do you think they will do to their app if left unvetted? The question then becomes, why would they bother with going through Apple's rigorous vetting which also limits their revenue per customer? Hint: They wont.
And, therein lies the problem. The only way to get apps onto an iPhone is via the App Store which Apple vets, and they do a damn good job at it. We get the privacy we pay them to provide us, and the App developers still have access to the user base. Give that up? Lets see. For what?
1. We are not short of apps. The ecosystem is healthy.
2. We are not overburdened by the cost of Apps, it amounts to relatively little.
3. Developers are not turning away from Apple's storefront. On the contrary, no one talks about the free app benefits the paid-for apps provide. So many free Apps are great.
4. We are consuming apps at insane rates. Practically every gadget comes with an App these days.
What exactly are the Europeans trying to fix? Apple is too successful because so many users and so many developers are working with it? No. Fuck that. The Europeans can go fuck themselves. they already fucked up web browsing with every website I visit asking me about cookie preferences. I have Ad-Block for that.-
Putting it out there, while I agree that Apple offers better default privacy options, better privacy is possible on Android for the dedicated. For years I ran Xprivacy/Xprivacy Lua, which were unique in that they didn't actually deny permissions, they were more insidious - they poisoned the well. New advertising ID every time, randomly generated phone number, my clipboard was always 'private', the app would happily show all 0 contacts in my phone book, I never moved from the North Pole unless I wanted to...
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I think it would be better to choose coordinates 0, 0. The developers/maintainers/data scientists are more likely to interpret that as a read error, a default, or something similar, which means they're more likely to discard that data, potentially along with other data that was collected along with it. Choosing place like the north pole is a bit more unique though, even if it's incorrect, and could possibly uniquely identify you across some apps, depending on how many other people made the same choice you d
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At least the North Pole has an easy to remember postal code, H0H 0H0 so it makes for a good mailing address and as long as your name is Santa, mail might even get answered.
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Bank of America is selling tracking on visitors to its page, what do you think they will do to their app if left unvetted? The question then becomes, why would they bother with going through Apple's rigorous vetting which also limits their revenue per customer? Hint: They wont.
Which is more likely:
Bank of America puts their app in the official app store
Bank of America, in all of its advertisements, gives their customers and potential customers a bunch of instructions on how to enable side loading, along with a place to download their app.
If you think the latter is at all plausible, then go back underneath Tim Cook's desk where you came from.
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In your Bank of America example, BoA could easily change the flow to send the tracking data directly to their servers. BoA could then send that data via B2B to all of the third-party tracking services that they want. Apple likely wouldn't be able to determine the type of data or its sensitivity as it would just look like any other application data being sent to genuine BoA REST endpoints. Therefore, I don't think Apple is preventing as much tracking as you're claiming - it's just pushing it into a layer
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What a complete load of bs. Your little rant about Bank of America is nothing more than fear mongering, which makes sense given Apple's love for fear mongering because it helps them sell their Fisher Price phones.
You haven't provided any actual evidence, from a user benefit perspective, to support your claim that having the choice to access third party app stores somehow devalue an official app store. What if I want to open an app store that performs even more thorough vetting and security than Apple? Wh-
The funniest part is that thr BoA doesn't need thr app store or anything really if they wanted to track users. Which stores, borderline what things they buy, when they were at stores... that's all part of the data they HAVE to gather
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We are not short of apps. The ecosystem is healthy.
No, we are not short of apps that Apple will let you have. An early example of this was back in the days of the iPod touch when I had a bluetooth GPS. The iPod touch could easily link to it and get GPS data but Apple decided that this was an unacceptable use of the device (no idea why) and so the only way to make it work was to jailbreak the device and install a third-party app store just so I could have a working GPS. After that, I went off Apple devices because it was clear that any unusual or innovative uses that were technically feasible could be just banned on a whim by apple.
What exactly are the Europeans trying to fix?
How about the freedom to use their mobile devices as they want without having to have a foreign, US corporation like Apple approve such uses first? It is a sad commentary on the state of the world if I need to explain how important freedom is to an American.
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There is no rigorous vetting going on. There are no code or design reviews. A human just tries out the program and makes sure all of the political boxes are checked (privacy disclosures..et el) then they run scans for unapproved function calls.
You don't stop someone by asking them nicely or doing naive checks of compiled code. You stop them with access controls.
An app asks for your location? The user should have three options. 1 approve, 2. deny, 3. lie.
An app asks for your data or wants network access
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The ability to use their phone the way they fucking want. *shrug* Minor point, I know. Surely not as important as their safety.
Dude, Apple is not my daddy. I don't want my daddy to be looking out for me and my safety. I am a grown fucking adult and I want to make my own fucking decisions. What is wrong with you that allows logic to override your own self interests? Logic says that you should just kill yourself now to avoid any danger because eventually, the world is going to kill you anyways. The magic happ
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I disagree. Apple blocks applications that compete with them (such as email, text messaging, and browsers), send political messages Apple doesn't like, or use 3rd-party payment systems. They block apps that use 3rd-party runtimes [appleinsider.com]. We have more than a decade of this nonsense. [businessinsider.com] Just yesterday, Slashdot posted about Apple rejecting a speedcam app without providing a reason. [slashdot.org]
That is not healthy.
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Android gets malware though and is a privacy nightmare in comparison to iOS.
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"Overall, we find that neither platform is clearly bet-ter than the other for privacy across the dimensions we studied"
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.137... [arxiv.org]
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Did you read the Report; or just the Summary at the top?
The Devil's in the Details. Small changes make big changes in Trackability. Apple stomps all over Google in this very important regard.
From the Report:
"If we assume, for the sake of argument, that an app shows personalised ads if and only if it has AdId access (because there is hardly any reason for apps not use the AdId for personalised ads), this suggests that Google AdMob was present in the majority of apps with personalised ads. This points to a hi
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Android lets developers do whatever tracking they want, however they want, there is no downside for them going through the main channel
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