I will say, having USB C on my iPad is very nice. Now if only they would do it for the iPhone. After the CSAM stuff hit I switched back to Android and it's so nice to only need one cable for everything.
Sometimes the alternative isn't much better, so instead of trying to punish myself and get a pixel, degoogle everything, etc. I voted with my wallet. Do I just keep my iPhone and let them get away with the CSAM on device scanning? I chose not to, even if the privacy is worse on android. Some may think that's ass backwards, but it was a solution for my beliefs.
Nah, Android 12 makes opting out of data collection for ads pretty straightforward. I'll take server scans instead of device scans any day of the week.
Same way it would get onto Apple’s servers: the customer chooses to upload it.
The difference is that with on-device screening, Apple wouldn’t have to take delivery of CSAM to detect it, and it doesn’t have to scan anything that’s not destined to be uploaded.
Did you read the comment I replied to? And read the second part of my comment? Not sure what your commment has to do with anything.
It's all good though, I'm still using an iPhone. But might switch, especially with so many people in HN comments telling me that Android would scan all my data and send it to Google without being able to substantiate that claim.
Presumably you're using Android with the Google frameworks installed, so it's sending all kinds of telemetry, usage, and location data to Google. You can confirm this with something like Charles proxy.
Or you may be one of the rare breed of people who can use a "de-Googled" Android distribution, such as CalyxOS, for over a month before giving up.
I'm on GrapheneOS since last December. Yes it's tough, but before that I had come to resent my phone and wondering what it was doing in the background.
What didn't you like? Been using LineageOS on an old OnePlus I had and I'm enjoying it the last few months. Especially knowing it's not doing anything weird without my approval.
It just required too much finicking with. With an iPhone, it's been a phone/camera and I don't need to spend any time messing with it.
I ran (and contributed to!) LineageOS^WCyanogenmod for years and years. It was great.
I can see myself returning to LineageOS (or similar), as iOS is getting quite buggy and I am put off by the wealth of gestures. It seems like whenever I use the iPhone, I accidentally swipe into some other screen. It's like slipping on banana peels.
Let’s wait until Apple actual starts device scanning before condemning them for it? Apple were up front with their plans and after hearing the public outcry they canceled their rollout. Other companies would have just rolled out the change without disclosure and called it a day.
Lets be crystal clear, Apple cancelled nothing. They only postponed. And every time they were challenged they double and tripled downed that we the customers were just confused. They are moving forward with this.
Ok, let’s use your terminology and say they are postponing the rollout. You speak as though they’ve already rolled it out. It could also be an indefinite postponement. Yet you insist on painting the narrative as if it already occurred. Guilty until proven innocent.
I’ll be right there next to you protesting my right to privacy if they do rollout the feature against our wishes, but until then I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Also you mention every time Apple is challenged they contend that customers were confused what instances are you referring to?
I mean I could go on but benefit of the doubt is gone after seeing Craig defend them so adamantly.
Why would Apple go to all this trouble, get some push back, and just throw their hands up and say you're right, we're not going to search for CSAM, sorry!
All the articles that you linked came prior to when Apple officially postponed the rollout. Doesn’t Apple have the right to explain and defend their position? Even though they tried defending their view adamantly they still ultimately didn’t go through with it. So why should I doubt their intentions?
IMO, I believe Apple was trying to offload CSAM scanning to devices to save some server-side processing costs. It was an example of Apple being stingy and penny pinching instead of anything nefarious.
That's an awfully generous viewpoint to take. One might imagine that the world's largest, highest valued company would find a more elegant solution than turning my phone into a portion of their botnet.
Apple already did roll out changes like this, without disclosure. They've been scanning your Emails like this without your knowledge for years, if it makes you feel any better.
On top of that, people aren't mad about cloud scanning: that's obviously nothing new. Wasting my CPU resources to do it though? It just further perpetuates this feeling that I don't actually own any of my Apple devices, but rather renting them from a company that seeks collection at every corner. As a developer, I was already appalled. Now that they're starting to cut corners at the expense of the consumer, it's only a matter of time before the veneer chips away and we all realize that Apple is Yet Another Big Tech Company Trying To Be Different (YABTCTTBD).
Re: scanning email, I did not see any articles that specifically said that Apple was scanning mail on-device. Can you point me to an article that states this fact clearly? As you say, scanning on the cloud isn’t really an issue since everyone is doing that anyways.
But as a developer you should know email is inherently not a secure method of communication thus you should not expect any privacy when using it. Email is analogous to sending a postcard through the mail system.
> But if I had to choose between Google and Apple for my privacy I would go with Apple (without much illusions).
See - I'm right there with you about not having much dog in this fight (I don't buy Apple hardware, and I mostly left google about 3 years ago) but I come out on the other side of the coin.
I'd much rather own a device made by folks I know I can't trust. Google is worse, but mostly honest about being worse.
Apple is a snake in the grass, though. I don't know what the fuck they're trying to do, but they sure have a good marketing team. To me, that's unpredictable and scary, even if the current state of their ecosystem is marginally more private.
I can sort of understand your poisiton if I squint hard enough... but what you're saying is that if apple came out as fully Anti-privacy and invasive like Google then you would be more okay with them than you are now.
Apple is way more pro lock-in and pro control than Google is, and that problem is unfixable. Google harvesting data if you don't fiddle with settings or install different android versions isn't a problem for technical users which I assume we are talking about here. Pretty much everything evil Google does is well documented and fixable, except data harvested from website visits but you'd have that issue with iphones as well. So then why would Apple devices be better? I see no reason at all to go with them except if you prefer living under a tech monopoly.
I mean - think of it like a coworker who doesn't like you.
It's much easier to work with someone (in my opinion) if you both agree you don't get along well and plan accordingly.
Having a co-worker that's sunshine and rainbows to your face, but scanning your phone for CSAM behind your back while talking shit about you to your manager is a lot harder.
it is easier to mitigate a technical problem that is up-front and already confrontational, than one which actively tries to mask the problem even exists by using language other than code
> Google is certainly less trustworthy than Apple if we're speaking about scanning your files
How so? Are Google scanning the local files on all Android devices? They might be collecting all sorts of data on what's the phone used for and by whom, but scanning files? Since when?
Their still having two connectors is even more annoying than I thought it would be. We have lots of iDevices from several generations and even brand new ones—but only some of them, though, significantly, all the iPhones—are still shipping with lightning, years after they should have gone to USB-C. Given how long we're able to keep these things around and in use, that means we'll be dealing with stupid lightning cables and two different kinds of dongle through at least 2026, even if they switch all their new devices to USB-C today. That, in addition to the irritation & expense of USB-C itself.
Well, the first one was a mis-designed piece of crap, so I don't mind that as much, though keeping it in use on some newer models after v2 was released does suck.
(source for assertion about them being crap: I own one—the bad part's entirely the terrible charging/connector design, but that part's nearly parody-levels of bad)
The pencil was intimately tied to the generation of iPad. The iPad had to have specific support for connecting to the corresponding generation of pencil. They could only enable the new pencil as they redesigned the iPads. They are now going through their iPad line and updating the designs which allows them to switch to the new pencil.
Yeah, I get the technical reason that as Pro chips shifted down-market to other iPads they couldn't add support for the new-model Pencil without significant (and unjustifiably expensive) changes, it's just unfortunate.
They had a similar, valid excuse for using Lightning connectors on lower-end phones and iPads for a while, but that time would now be long past if they'd introduced them when they should have, yet even the last round of top-end iPhones still had the damn things. I'm at the point where nearly the only things I can't charge with one laptop USB-C charger, and use with a single set of USB-C dongles, are old iPads (understandable) and new iPhones (which is the real WTF). Current-gen game controllers, the Nintendo Switch itself, my (non-Apple) wireless headphones, my (non-Apple) mechanical wireless keyboard, MacBook Air, 4th-gen iPad Pro, all USB-C for power. My 12-series iPhone I hope to use for at least three more years, and maybe as many as five, barring some must-have tech breakthroughs or my damaging it badly? Goddamn lightning connector.
Especially weird (though understandable) because it's basically "Doesn't scan your device and send the information to a corporation and the government" when Android basically does that everywhere, all the time.
But Android does it for profit, Apple does it "for the children."
Would you be down to write a blog post about how a "degoogled phone" still scans your data and sends it to Google? Let's say a Pixel 5 with CalyxOS? I didn't know thats the case.
Tbh, I'd even love to see a current blog post on how much and what data a "semi-degoogled" random OEM phone with the shipped Android sends.
Or maybe there is one that I don't know of, would love to see it.
It just seems really weird to assume that switching to Android involves switching to Google services. There were weeks of threads with people discussing which version of Android (Calyx vs graphene, etc) they were going to switch to.
We invest heavily in fighting child sexual exploitation online and use technology to deter, detect, and remove CSAM from our platforms. This includes automated detection and human review, in addition to relying on reports submitted by our users and third parties such as NGOs, to detect, remove, and report CSAM on our platforms. We deploy hash matching, including YouTube’s CSAI Match, to detect known CSAM. We also deploy machine learning classifiers to discover never-before-seen CSAM, which is then confirmed by our specialist review teams. Using our classifiers, Google created the Content Safety API, which we provide to others to help them prioritize abuse content for human review.
