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Tim Cook Addresses Privacy, Government Requests in New NPR Interview
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This is very true. But unfortunately, the general opinion isn't that you're not paying the (full) price of one's products, it's that you're paying outrageously high margins for the other's.
The very BEST argument I have heard as proof man landed on the moon was this: "It was done during the cold war, Russian was watching and monitoring the whole program. If they had ANY evidence that the landing were faked they would have said something, and they never have.
Its the same with Apple. Apple KNOWS there are people looking, watching hoping they can be the ones to cry out "Apple and the government are in bed with each other, here is the proof". Any such proof would destroy Apple, so I believe them.
Its the same with Apple. Apple KNOWS there are people looking, watching hoping they can be the ones to cry out "Apple and the government are in bed with each other, here is the proof". Any such proof would destroy Apple, so I believe them.
swingerofbirch
macrumors 68040
I think that's true, but just because you're paying for a product doesn't mean you're not ALSO the product. A company always has motivation to make profit, whether it's already made profit off of a sale or not. Vizio, for example, sells televisions and uses content recognition to report back to the company what you watch on your TV. You're still taking companies at their word whether you pay for the product or not.
Oh and you missed the important thing. "WHICH" government.
96% of the world lives outside of the USA, are NOT US citizens, are NOT protected by the constitution, are NOT subject to US laws, etc etc etc.
So WHICH government is important. Do you think the Chinese, Russians, Indian, Saudi, Israeli, UK, EU governments might also like access to the backdoor. And I am damn sure they are looking for them.
So exactly WHICH government are you referring to , because if one gets it, the rest will follow very shortly afterwards.
96% of the world lives outside of the USA, are NOT US citizens, are NOT protected by the constitution, are NOT subject to US laws, etc etc etc.
So WHICH government is important. Do you think the Chinese, Russians, Indian, Saudi, Israeli, UK, EU governments might also like access to the backdoor. And I am damn sure they are looking for them.
So exactly WHICH government are you referring to , because if one gets it, the rest will follow very shortly afterwards.
That's such a tired sound bite. Plays well and means nothing. You just don't get it.
Maybe because he wants to? Not everyone at Apple has to be business casual all the time.
Unless you're about to blow the whistle on the U.S. Government and then you suddenly disappear. Then Apple and the U.S. Government continue their sleepover.
Google’s information-gathering channels
Google’s stated mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and it is making good on this promise. However, Google is gathering even more information than most of us realize.
- Searches (web, images, news, blogs, etc.) – Google is, as you all know, the most popular search engine in the world with a market share of almost 70% (for example, 66% of searches in the US are made on Google). Google tracks all searches, and now with search becoming more and more personalized, this information is bound to grow increasingly detailed and user specific.
- Clicks on search results – Not only does Google get information on what we search for, it also gets to find out which search results we click on.
- Web crawling – Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, is a busy bee, continuously reading and indexing billions of web pages.
- Website analytics – Google Analytics is by far the most popular website analytics package out there. Due to being free and still supporting a number of advanced features, it’s used by a large percentage of the world’s websites.
- Ad serving – Adwords and Adsense are cornerstones of Google’s financial success, but they also provide Google with a lot of valuable data. Which ads are people clicking on, which keywords are advertisers bidding on, and which ones are worth the most? All of this is useful information.
- Email – Gmail is one of the three largest email services in the world, together with competing options from Microsoft (Hotmail) and Yahoo. Email content, both sent and received, is parsed and analyzed. Even from a security standpoint this is a great service for Google. Google’s email security service, Postini, gets a huge amount of data about spam, malware and email security trends from the huge mass of Gmail users.
- Twitter – “All your tweets are belong to us,” to paraphrase an early Internet meme. Google has direct access to all tweets that pass through Twitter after a deal made late last year.
- Google Apps (Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, etc.) – Google’s office suite has many users and is of course a valuable data source to Google.
- Google Public Profiles – Google encourages you to put a profile about yourself publicly on the Web, including where you can be found on social media sites and your homepage, etc.
- Orkut – Google’s social network isn’t a success everywhere, but it’s huge in some parts of the world (mainly Brazil and India).
- Google Public DNS – Google’s newly launched DNS service doesn’t just help people get fast DNS lookups, it helps Google too, because it will get a ton of statistics from this, for example what websites people access.
- The Google Chrome browser – What is your web browsing behavior? What sites do you visit?
- Google Finance – Aside from the finance data itself, what users search for and use on Google Finance is sure to be valuable data to Google.
- YouTube – The world’s largest and most popular video site by far is, as you know, owned by Google. It gives Google a huge amount of information about its users’ viewing habits.
- Google Translate – Helps Google perfect its natural language parsing and translation.
- Google Books – Not huge for now, but has the potential to help Google figure out what people are reading and want to read.
- Google Reader – By far the most popular feed reader in the world. What RSS feeds do you subscribe to? What blog posts do you read? Google will know.
- Feedburner – Most blogs use Feedburner to publicize their RSS feeds, and every Feedburner link is tracked by Google.
- Google Maps and Google Earth – What parts of the world are you interested in?
- Your contact network – Your contacts in Google Talk, Gmail, etc, make up an intricate network of users. And if those also use Google, the network can be mapped even further. We don’t know if Google does this, but the data is there for the taking.
- Coming soon – Chrome OS, Google Wave, more up-and-coming products from Google.
Much of this data is anonymized, but not always right away. Logs are kept for nine months, and cookies (for services that use them) aren’t anonymized until after 18 months. Even after that, the sheer amount of generic user data that Google has on its hands is a huge competitive advantage against most other companies, a veritable gold mine.
For this reason alone, I would be an Apple user.
Google is evil. Facebook isn't far behind.
Google is evil. Facebook isn't far behind.
Tie = Gold. Face = Rose Gold. Suit - Space Gray. Hair = Silver.
I use Mercury browser on the iPad and Safari on the iPhone. I like that Safari added duckduckgo as a search option - it's a very decent search engine and they have a fairly strong stance on privacy. I tend to alternate between duckduckgo and google for my searches (because of course google is still the best in many cases). But Firefox is coming to iOS soon and they're probably the best for privacy of all the major web browsers. It's my non-mobile default and I'll definitely make the switch on my iOS devices if it works well.
Tim Cook rocks. Love that they have seen this is a differentiator they can grab and trumpet with both hands.
The sad thing is that Apple is the only big computer company doing this (with a reasonable expectation that they're probably not coding back doors in for the 3 letter agencies).
The sad thing is that Apple is the only big computer company doing this (with a reasonable expectation that they're probably not coding back doors in for the 3 letter agencies).
Enter: The whole question of who is good or bad, and when the good become the bad.
I strongly disagree with this, particularly for a company as powerful as Apple. They are one of the only bodies that could realistically, effectively, and consistently stand up to that kind of pressure.
Whether they are...hard to be sure. But I believe them capable.
Dude seriously ... If you need to ask this question then you might realize why some of us believe a huge number of people that suck the tit of Android and Google never think twice that it's nothing but a cover to mine and sell your personal data to the highest bidder whomever that bidder is -- because guess what -- when's the last time the PUBLIC COMPANY Google disclosed who their data clients are...as in who are the people buying YOUR search and visit information... Get it?? Any guesses???
Seriously people. Wake up.
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His statement on "back doors" doesn't actually deny it. It just says it's a bad idea. I can guarantee that to have such favourable treatment in the Chinese market, that the Chinese Government have some degree of control over the device contents.
Companies working in China have to either have specific, separate partners that trade on their behalf in China, or they have to register seperate companies that obviously must adhere to the countries laws. Google refused this, left and got subsequently blocked in totality. Microsoft wanted Skype in the market and partnered to create "Tom Skype" a product that logs local users conversations and delivers them to government authorities when certain sensitive words trigger it.
Apple seems to be a golden child here, so there's no reason to suspect that they get to skirt these kinds of requirements.
*removes tin foil hat*
Companies working in China have to either have specific, separate partners that trade on their behalf in China, or they have to register seperate companies that obviously must adhere to the countries laws. Google refused this, left and got subsequently blocked in totality. Microsoft wanted Skype in the market and partnered to create "Tom Skype" a product that logs local users conversations and delivers them to government authorities when certain sensitive words trigger it.
Apple seems to be a golden child here, so there's no reason to suspect that they get to skirt these kinds of requirements.
*removes tin foil hat*