Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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With the recent WWDC apple made some bold claims about privacy when it comes to so called Apple Intelligence. This makes me wonder if they did something to what Microsoft did with Recall feature, would people be less concerned and to an extend praise their effort?

Do you trust apple with their claims?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 months ago (16 children)

Apple's PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like "OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI", and with Apple it's more like "Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been".

Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don't even have yet.

Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it's done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it's closed source and is subject to change at any time.

Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple's products whatever the company does.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Makes a lot of sense until the closed source affirmation. The source code of the OS they develop is closed source, but a lot of what they do is open source and independantly audited by experts, so there's that in the balance.

Windows is just a pile of trash.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (10 children)

What that Apple does is Open Source? This is the first time I've read this.

[–] matthewc 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Darwin. Their BSD and the foundation of MacOS and therefore all the current OSes they produce.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I have heard of Darwin, and went back to read up on it to refresh my memory. While it is considered open source, it is also useless unless it is used for Apple's closed source operating systems, as can be appreciated in this explanation:

In the beginning, Apple used to make Darwin available as a separate OS, including compiled binaries, installers, ISOs, etc. that you could install on Apple hardware. However, for many years now, Apple only provides a source code dump, every time a new release of macOS comes out. It isn't even possible to compile this source code, because it depends on Apple's internal build tools and build pipeline. There have been some projects trying to patch Darwin to compile it with publicly available tools, but those projects have all died from lack of interest.

Open Source should be compilable and able to be used, at least that's my perspective, and I just may be wrong.

Here's the article this came from on StackExchange:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/401832/why-is-macos-often-referred-to-as-darwin

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that's just the kernel. Anything above that (window manager, the utilities that they didn't outright copy from BSD, apps, ...) is basically closed source.