I read HN almost every day, and AFAIK there are only a few incidents of accounts being cancelled, which, while worrying, don't strike me as exceptionally strange for a company the size of Google, and I would be willing to bet that Apple has done the same thing, and has exactly the same lawyer-y cancellation conditions in their TOS (we can do whatever we want!).
I thought Google were pretty good about encrypting everything between their datacenters also to hopefully avoid/mitigate governmental spying.
I was impressed that Apple took a stand about breaking into that iphone of the dead terrorist though. And just the fact that they brought the issue of government spying into the public eye was a very good thing.
Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple? Legitimate question, I'm not married to either company.
The worst thing for me personally about Apple is their schedule of obsolescence ("courage"!) and arbitrary decisions about what you're permitted to do with the hardware you paid for.
I don't actually like the idea of the cloud much at all. I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted, encrypted solutions that work just as well as google/icloud. "The cloud" is just other people's servers. Both companies' solutions make me nervous in slightly different ways.
It's been a few days, I don't know if you or anyone else will ever see this but....
> I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted
man, me too! that would alleviate a lot of my concerns but the whole home server idea has struggled to gain any real traction.
>Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple?
There are a number of specific events as well as the over-arcing trend.
First and foremost, they aren't even hiding it anymore [1].
They have censored 1m websites and 2b individual URLs because other companies asked them too [2].
They monitor every god damn thing you do [3][4][5], yes even your android keyboard data [6].
And then make it available to law enforcement [7].
Finally, let's not forget, they are an ad company [8] so it's in their best interest to sell more ads.
So, all of that being said, the general trend is the most disturbing thing of all. As google grows their ad company, they are expanding into more and more areas of your life. Now, Ok Google is a household term [9], and they gather more and more data to sell more ads [10]. It entirely possible that you are spend more time with google than you do with anyone else. Your phone is next to you all day, you search with google, your email and chat is scanned by google, your keyboard actions are monitored by Google. Google earth takes pictures of our roadways and houses, google streetview takes pictures of the vehicles in your driveway.
They have root access to 90% of mobile smart devices [11]. Everything we do, say, buy, utter, mumble, research, discuss is being handed over to the worlds largest advertising company, whose job it is to direct traffic to people who pay them [12][13]. That means its there JOB to to dismiss legitimate content which is explicit censorship, with the additional benefit of the chilling-effect [14], and instead serve you something that will sell more ads [15].
> The worst thing for me personally about Apple is their schedule of obsolescence.
So much this! This one of the main reasons I avoided apple products for a long time. But with the privacy concerns these days, "not being able to upgrade RAM" is not a viable excuse for using google or Microsoft products. However, I still refuse to buy a macbook, linux works very well these days as a nearly drop in replacement for windows or osx.
So that's it. Apple is more secure, even if only by default without policy considerations, because their business model is about selling products, not ads. And when you consider policies, it's not even a close fight, apple is clearly the best large company when it comes to user privacy [16][17].
Hmm... Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I'm still not 100% convinced that Apple's only trying to sell devices and not data, but I understand your points.
I thought Google were pretty good about encrypting everything between their datacenters also to hopefully avoid/mitigate governmental spying.
I was impressed that Apple took a stand about breaking into that iphone of the dead terrorist though. And just the fact that they brought the issue of government spying into the public eye was a very good thing.
Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple? Legitimate question, I'm not married to either company.
The worst thing for me personally about Apple is their schedule of obsolescence ("courage"!) and arbitrary decisions about what you're permitted to do with the hardware you paid for.
I don't actually like the idea of the cloud much at all. I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted, encrypted solutions that work just as well as google/icloud. "The cloud" is just other people's servers. Both companies' solutions make me nervous in slightly different ways.