1: Google’s entire business model includes selling your data and activity and advertise to you based on that. They have been sued for lying about this and had to settle.

2: Yes, this is directly stated in the setup screen for devices as on by default, which you can opt-out from then or at any time.

3: Let’s get mad at them for doing that when they actually do it.

4: Not sure there are many “rabid” users anymore, or at least here anyway. But there’s a difference between defending a company and flat out calling bs on an bs accusation.

I do not understand why people like making up reasons to hate on a corporation when there are so many other legitimate reasons to hate that corporation instead.

Where is that in their revenue streams? Nearly all of their profit comes from selling hardware and services.

You could argue they profit off insecure default settings, such as having Google as the default search engine or analyzing Siri recordings or how they use aggregated usage data, but to date I’m not aware of Apple either profiting directly off data it collects from users, or selling that data to third-parties.

Selling ads or user data is nowhere in their business model. They don’t need to, and the trust they risk losing from doing so is a powerful detractor. They’re not perfect, but as far as corporations go they could be much, much worse. They’re not comparable to Google in terms of privacy at all.

Here’s a source confirming as much: https://fossbytes.com/apple-data-collection-explained/

Turns out the answer is No, Apple doesn’t sell your data to third-party advertisers. The Cupertino giant possesses the exclusive rights of showing you ads on the App Store and other apps. This means your data is used by Apple to show ads, but not sold to any other advertisers…

Follow the money, they don’t profit off spying on you selling your data to other companies, this makes them the lesser evil but they’re still evil for sure.

Last week’s The Rehearsal episode where in order to understand Sully Sullenberger’s state of mind when safely landing his plane into the Hudson he uses his memoir as a guide to backtrack and rehearse his life and major experiences starting as an infant, and progresses through his childhood and early adulthood.

Here’s part 1/3 of the relevant section of the episode but quick warning, it’s pretty weird and shocking even for Nathan Fielder but goddamn that has to be the hardest I’ve laughed at a TV show since Nathan for You:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQtYnkV4in0&pp=ygUTVGhlIHJlaGVhcnNhbCBzdWxseQ%3D%3D

I’m aware and meant what I said.

If the Tesla board has any intelligence left, they will push him out.

They deserve all the hurt incurred so far for not doing it yet, and will deserve to go under if they don’t in time.

Also not realistic. Even if the UK government didn’t perceive that as fraud, Apple accounts (and most other businesses’ accounts) are region-locked and cannot be transferred elsewhere to prevent going around laws in this way.

This means that every user would also need to make new Apple accounts in their new country of choice and give up any purchases/subscriptions/data in their UK accounts. And possibly need new out of country phone numbers and service as well.

….or a government demanding a way in.

Even your alternative requires someone to give money to a tech conglomerate. There is no perfect alternative this late into capitalism Even if there was, it’s not realistic for millions of Apple devices around the world to suddenly be replaced.

By no means should that discourage anyone reading this from taking action to control your data better, however. I also self-host and am doing everything I can to minimize my reliance on big companies, but there are time, skill and monetary gaps there not everyone can overcome.

Apple’s choices here were:

1. Do what they did, and remove the feature for the UK only

2. Create a backdoor into their OS that can potentially be used by not just governments, but bad actors too, effectively crippling security for every single device they sell worldwide and bypassing the usefulness of on-device encryption entirely.

3. Exit the UK market, which is not realistic and would leave millions of UK customers without any further recourse than to replace their Apple devices, which is incredibly wasteful and expensive (not to mention inconvenient).

Apple chose the lesser evil. What more could you possibly expect in this situation? If you want to protest, protest the government demanding that level of surveillance on their citizens.

Yep. This is exactly what I expected them to do. They don’t want the liability of losing your data or enabling your privacy to be compromised on their devices, and the eroded trust of their customer base from that.

Unfortunately the UK put them between a rock and a hard place here. As shitty as it is, I’m glad they opted to remove the feature for only that market, rather than weaken it for everyone. It sucks, but it’s the lesser evil.

I don’t think they had any good choices here. Just like the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, they decided not to make the device’s OS inherently less secure with the inclusion of a backdoor and I can at least appreciate that much.

Concepts of a recipe.

Any country could do this, and it’s a bigger start than most are making. I think the “barely any effort” bit was relative compared to what other, bigger, richer countries are prioritizing instead.

Maybe it’s not literally effortless but compared to other countries, yeah.

I’m not trying to give them a free pass at selling oil or anything, but this is a much better use of the profits compared to other countries.

I’d rather see a country exporting fossil fuels doing something with that money to not use fossil fuels than give it to Billionaires or something.

If more countries followed their example, there wouldn’t be much demand left for that oil.

My dude you literally just explained why you shouldn’t blame the appliance 😄

I already agreed infrastructure needs to be taken into account when making large purchase decisions.

You can leave this thread any time if what I’ve said upsets you.

I guess I just don’t see things in such a short-sighted way. It makes no sense being mad at a car that plugs in to charge if you bought it knowing full well you can’t do that. It makes no sense to blame a fridge if there’s an electrical outage because the fridge didn’t cause it. It makes no sense to blame your solar panels on a rainy day because your solar panels do not control the weather. While you need to consider the limitations of anything you purchase before you purchase them, blaming the whole package when anything goes wrong is neither helpful nor productive. I don’t blame my car when a charging station is full, I blame our shitty charging infrastructure in this country that causes this problem.

Blame yourself and/or your housing situation if you can’t charge your car, blame the power utility if the power goes out, blame the weather for your bad day of solar power production. In each case, the problem doesn’t lie with the appliance, it lies with the infrastructure (and/or poor planning on the individual’s part). The appliance is working as designed. If that upsets you then you’re never going to be happy with anything.

I can’t believe I just had to say that.

If you buy a vehicle knowing you don’t have the means to fuel it, it’s not the vehicle that’s the problem lol.

I make public charging work, and knew what I was getting into prior to buying it.

If you want to explore the hypothetical of every home in the country suddenly being without power, I would still consider that a failure of our infrastructure/housing more than the vehicle itself. In that situation the vehicle is fine, you just can’t fuel it. You would also have other issues to worry about.

Would you blame your refrigerator for no longer being able to keep your food cool in a power outage as readily as you would your EV for not charging, or would you blame the grid’s inability to deliver reliable power to your home?

I think we’re just saying the same thing in different ways here.

We can blame lack of EV adoption (in part) on infrastructure reasons, but that itself is no reflection of the vehicle.

OTOH, there are reasons hydrogen vehicles never took off beyond simply infrastructure, so I’m not sure why this example was given.

If there were no gas stations around…. I would blame ICE cars for needing gas

Not the lacking infrastructure?

I agree infrastructure is part of the package of buying the vehicle I’m just not sure why you would blame one for the inconvenience of the other. Why not blame infrastructure for infrastructure problems, and vehicles for vehicle problems?

Hydrogen cars also suffer from an infrastructure issue, yes….among others, mainly just not being competitive with EVs at all because they’re not really any better at anything except for fueling time.

As an EV owner without the convenience of charging at home, I don’t blame the vehicle. There are plenty of other conveniences that come with one to offset the inconvenience of charging elsewhere.

I’m not sure what point you’re making here apart from “this is the world we live in”, which was never really in doubt.

That does nothing to inhibit this achievement.

Maybe if the rest of us got our collective thumbs out of our asses and started curbing our addiction to fossil fuels they wouldn’t have to sell oil to other countries.

Your comment history seems to be fueled by a lot of hate and misinformation.