While I knew that the "privacy" stance from Apple in prior years was always a marketing facade to sell more devices, I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible.
It's kind of funny how I am very suspicious of governments and politicians but when it comes to a trillion dollar corporation, I was giving them more of benefit of doubt. I was wrong.
I appreciate you saying this, I felt the same way. I was delighted when Apple started selling privacy hard, and hoped it would persist. Their "Mind your own business" [1] ad was a delight - only 2 months ago. Now my question is, which of the annoying characters in the ad is Apple?
> I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible.
Considering how often Apple gives up customer data without a fight when requested to by the government, I don't really believe that.
According to Apple, they respond to government data requests with customers' data ~85% of the time, and 92% in cases of "emergencies"[1].
Apple gave customer data from over 31,000 users/accounts based on FISA requests and National Security Letter requests in the first half of 2020 alone[1].
During that same 6 month period, Apple provided customers' data to the government's data requests (not FISC related) about 9,000 times[1].
> During that same 6 month period, Apple provided customers' data to the government's data requests (not FISC related) about 9,000 times
To clarify: The 9,000 figure is the number of individual data requests, but the requests themselves asked for data from a total of ~120,000 different users/accounts. Multiple users' data can be requested in a single request.
I don’t know if the first half of 2020 is a good time frame for sampling as this is when the country had the largest amount of protests in history and the police are going to be making a lot of requests in retaliation.
Doesn’t make Apple look any better though. I’m curious about how often Google and Facebook hand over information.
I don't necessarily think you were wrong to believe in Apple, perhaps just a bit naive about how little "as much as possible" is good for in this context.
Apple is a public corporation at the mercy of several superpowers. Economic incentives and the people with the guns make the rules. Full stop. Apple's privacy stance was always one desperate/amibitious business unit or bureaucrat away from complete collapse.
Have you ever considered that the profit motive might be responsible for leading all companies to act unethically? In the future, it's a good reason never to trust them.
It's kind of funny how I am very suspicious of governments and politicians but when it comes to a trillion dollar corporation, I was giving them more of benefit of doubt. I was wrong.