Lol not sure why people are giving you shit! It’s clearly organized, although perhaps not how some people would personally like it. Glad you’re having fun with it!

Lol your yuck is always going to be someone’s yum and vice versa, so careful where you throw that disgusting word around, it’ll come back to you eventually.

No, but they have to disclose all possible avenues of collection. I for one like storing my health data in icloud for processing and retention. They take that data, run it through algorithms, and use it to provide me things like estimated sleep cycle details.

Yes. Also yes. I find quite a bit of it distasteful, but as a systems administrator I have to be informed of all privacy policies guiding the disclosure and use of company data. It sucks, they’re lengthy and overwhelming, and often you’re right they do ask for too much but at the end of the day it’s less than you’d expect and they never make their money selling it, which is more than you can say about any software company of Apple’s scale.

If I set the boundaries they’d have none. That’s my preference and why I E2E encrypt everything on my device. I’d give up features and self host if I could, but all of that just isn’t possible for your average user or for them to stay competitive in their business model. Users don’t want to know what E2E is, they don’t want things “losable”, and honestly don’t care about their privacy (check the privacy policy of meta and TikTok vs Apple if you don’t believe me that there’s a difference and the vast majority do not care). That being said Apple provides what I see as the best middle ground. Enough privacy to remain confident my data is secure (E2E icloud backups, E2E messaging, etc) but enough gathering to keep their services competitive with more lucrative competitors with looser policies. Oh. And it would be too far when they started selling it to third party companies. That’s what msde me leave my android phone behind, when Google started migrating all the apis to Google Play Services instead of ASOP apis.

No offense taken, I understand your rage and I agree with your sentiment. They ask too much. But when you compare the other options, it’s the safest path in my honest opinion.

I unfortunately don’t have much to share beyond a decent understanding of compute systems at an enterprise scale (where we utilize these low level subprocessors to do various things such as gather asset data or deploy operating system configurations, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology). The point I’m trying to make though is that current operating models don’t allow for system trust. If you can’t trust apple with high level data like that needed for llm models on-device (which is how they’ve configured it, requiring a specific user approval and interaction before forwarding minimal data to private process servers) then you shouldn’t trust any device that lacks a complete open boot/firmware/ and OS stack because if these companies were going to exploit your data that egregiously, they already have the lowest level (best) access possible to a system that can transparently (without your knowledge) access encryption enclaves, networking, and storage. Truly open alternatives do exist by the way (see Coreboot, etc) but you’re going to be looking at devices 10-20 years old since almost the entire industry runs proprietary at that level and it takes time for the less heavily funded community players to get up to speed.

They’re not just security platforms. They’re low level computer systems with entire bespoke operating systems and better-than-kernel level access to the system (networking, etc). You have no idea what you’re talking about. Please inform yourself.

You do understand they use all this data to provide services using it and as such they have to disclose that in their privacy policy, right? For example, health data collection, is literally required to be disclosed to offer health services such as step tracking. You’re way way off base here.

You almost certainly run all of your software on code you lack access to the source for. Firmware and etc has been completely proprietary for ages. There’s even a tiny proprietary os embedded in almost every processor on the planet. Your statement lacks context of computing and shows a misplacement of trust.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor

Apple secures third party audits for their devices and designs, additionally security researchers have methods of verifying certain aspects of device behavior. People dig into stuff and Apple has not only a history of good privacy design, but as far as I’m aware they’ve never been caught doing anything remotely out of scope of their tight knit privacy policies with user data. Your complaint is baseless.

This would be impossible to do in camera and would look horrid even if it weren’t. That’s why they’d do it in CGI.

I think maybe you’re still missing the field for the trees. USB C oddly as it’s named has for almost all of it’s life been a connector standard, of which open connector standards (that arguably weren’t as good) existed back then in the form of micro and mini usb which for charging would be more than adequate vs rolling your own connector. I think the thing apple pursued here by rolling there own wasn’t even the royalties on it, but direct control of the 3rd party peripheral market (music docks, etc, etc). They’ve always made safe choices to ensure their market dominance through secondary market forces vs primary ones. Fwiw I’d have had no criticism for Apple regarding lightning if they opened the standard and shared it.

Now. As far as RCS goes. That’s just the fault of the people. It takes legitimately 5 minutes at most to download and sign up for signal, or another secure message provider, and the average user has chosen to completely ignore this and use whatever standard their carrier sold them with the phone. Yes carriers, Google, and everyone else should shoulder a ton of blame for settling on such a paltry default, but it’s as easy and seamless as it can possibly be to switch off that default and rather than migrate to another (like most other countries) the US population has decided to firmly stick their heads in the sand and use only the default, going as far to forgo “difficult and complex mfa security keys” (not even that difficult. Just scan a qr code and cloud sync for your mfa app) in favor of expensive, insecure, and quite frankly stupid mfa through sms. Its just not a tech issue at this point, but a user issue because people get too attached to defaults or too insistent on not changing. Just look at internet Explorer. Msft had it at end of life status for nearly a decade and people still insisted upon using it, right up until they ripped it from the os, and having worked in the industry I can assure you the users with the firmest grip on IE didn’t want it for compatibility reasons. They wanted it because the disliked change.

I think your blame is misplaced. The EU is trying to protect you from that. The tech companies prefer life much harder. iPhones for example were a holdout for over 10 years while every single other phone manufacturer agreed to a common charging standard that was open and even interchangeable with everyday rechargeable embedded devices. The cookies prompt doesn’t have to exist either. It’s fully within the rights of the website to forgo it, but then they’d have to forgo siphoning your profitable data from you and the prompt is merely the regulatory body requiring that they offer you a choice. They could default it to off and even prompt you once to enable it, but the design is specifically meant to be frustrating so you get upset at the regulation protecting you instead of the product using you.

I think you may want to rebase and regulate your feed more selectively, especially if you’re getting multiple reposts. The reason they bring it up in the article though is because it’s a direct quote from the published investigation. As far as the other stuff, in my (Apple agnostic, I have many of their devices but no loyalty) opinion I and the userbase have only benefited from EU influence. sent from my iPhone currently charging over usb c

Did you… Just… Uh… Skip over the part where the number of business users were 11x the set threshold because you found it irrelevant to your argument or so you could remain angry and hopefully get others angry without them having the relevant information as well?

It’s less likely we’re at the limit and more likely that the companies producing ai/llm tools are aiming for profitability instead of research/next gen implementation. Consider a current popular known use case for ai: Taking a fast food order. Now current estimates put a single query to chat gpt 4 to cost within the realm of 20-40 cents. Not exactly profitable if you’re trying to sell a $1.50 hamburger. If you can pair down these same mostly capable models so electricity and hardware costs are negligible, suddenly you open yourself up to a world of profitability.