It's conjecture, but it's likely. Apple as a company has put a high value on user privacy, which was heavily influenced by Steve. He was also known for maintaining a high degree of personal privacy for such a public figure (for instance, refusing to put plates on his car).
This reminds me of a friend of mine who proxies all his web traffic through something which strips user agents and referrers. It's very easy for me to tell when he visits my website, because the logs show "-" for each of these fields.
>This reminds me of a friend of mine who proxies all his web traffic through something which strips user agents and referrers. It's very easy for me to tell when he visits my website, because the logs show "-" for each of these fields.
I wonder if the best strategy, then, is to figure out a very common user agent string and use that. The EFF's Panopticlick might be a good start: https://panopticlick.eff.org.
That's really interesting. It sounds like an easy way to get targeted by the people who do want to track you, though. Still -- do you have any idea what he uses for that?
Apple is a company producing consumer devices, while the others are companies offering Internet services, which is what PRISM targets. Apple has only recently had some success in the Internet services space with iCloud.
The main difference before iCloud was that you had to pay for it. I can however remember that I've had free .me account before iCloud, so even .me must have had enough users.
Well, in the NSA's eyes, that main difference is important. Free (and highly pushed by the very popular iPhone and iPad) meant people actually starting using iCloud. The cost-benefit analysis shifted tremendously from .mac/MobileMe.
It is fun to think of Steve Jobs as the lone person saying "fuck you" to the NSA. But it isn't realistic. It isn't like the other companies are run by meek people who love bending over to authorities.
I can remember that I've had a free .me account before iCloud, so I believe even .me must have had enough users: it was freely available to every iDevice user. There were millions of them fast.
How does that follow? It is not just about the cost, but the amount of utility for the NSA. There are plenty of free services that are not on the PRISM list and I am sure even Apple employees would freely admit their pre-iCloud user numbers were disappointing. They would not have bothered to rebrand the service in the first place if they had a significant userbase.
Looking at the PRISM company list, we are talking data service companies with users in the tens of millions (minus the oddball Paltalk). Apple just wasn't in that group until recently.
