Out of interest, is there any evidence that Apple are collating data and making it available to 3rd parties in the same way as Facebook? They like to position themselves as more caring of the user’s privacy than the rest, but I’d definitely like to know more about any problems.
In early 2011, the minimum buy price on the platform was $500K. By midyear, $300K. By early 2012, $100K. Early 2013? $50 (no K missing, just fifty bucks).
I believe you that it was a failure, but that doesn't follow from the minimum price dropping. Perhaps as they gained confidence in the system, they allowed smaller buys with smaller prices (but still just as profitable).
Advertising revenue can be completely offset by the government? That seems unlikely given how much these companies make off of advertising. It would be amazing that the Apple and the USG could hide that kind of massive money transfer off their books.
It used to be one of the only share targets (Twitter was the other). iOS 10 & 11 removed it; to log in with FB or share to FB through the OS, you must install the app to do so.
Apple likes to loudly proclaim that they care about protecting their user's data, but they also refuse to put their money where their mouth is. That to me is telling enough.
I do think it's important to note that I have not seen direct evidence of them abusing that data, but we've seen plenty of companies/governments/organizations doing bad things for years without direct evidence.
I guess you can argue that WebKit, CUPS, Darwin, LLVM etc were open-source before Apple started using/sponsoring them (or based new software on them) and so had to continue, but Swift was a from-scratch project that was open sourced.
As for zero-knowlege encryption, iCloud Keychain is although the rest isn’t, you’re right there. Hopefully they’ll move in that direction.
I'm not saying that Apple is staunchly against FOSS or anything, and they absolutely do release a lot of FOSS stuff (which is awesome!), but their platform is absolutely not FOSS. I still can't compile my own iOS or MacOS.
If Apple open-sourced their OS you'd have a CentOS in half a day. Apple definitely doesn't want clones, it means less customers and less cohesive branding, so is there any reason this wouldn't be a very damaging move?
It's definitely possible that this would have detrimental effects to their bottom line. I know I would start buying their products, and I would encourage others to do so, though, I'm not sure if that would make up for the loss.
But that's irrelevant to the point. The point is that Apple prevents users from understanding or controlling how the user's data is being used. Just because we understand why they won't fix it doesn't make it any less true that they could fix it, but choose not to.
And that's what I mean by "putting their money where their mouth is". They talk a big talk about protecting their users, but their actions are different than their speech.
