DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps(spreadprivacy.com) |
DuckDuckGo will use Apple Maps(spreadprivacy.com) |
I'm not sure Apple wants to get into the mess that offering a major search engine is.
Google is paying them quite well for the opportunity to be the search engine on Apple devices.
When you use Apple Maps to go anywhere, you do have to duck :-)
Kind of defeats the purpose if I have to use google for half of my searches.
Ddg reportedly does collect some information (?), and their core is closed source.
Personally, I am highly skeptical regarding DDG and find much of their marketing to be hyperbolic (see the duck.com foolishness [0]). For me, I feel that if I'm just going to get Bing search results and Bing ads, I might as well just use Bing.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust...
I started using DDG (slowly trying to remove Google as much out of my daily life as possible) after reading about how Google ATAP tried to patent a MIT researchers life’s work without her knowledge or consent.
We could spend a decade evangelising for DDG, it becomes a significant mainstream player, and then gets sold to someone with totally different priorities. I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, is there a legal barrier to this scenario playing out?
Lastly, I know the bulk of my searches go through DDG so I don’t have to think about what I searched, on what devices, was it on a public net, was VPN enabled?? etc etc.. What are you thoughts? Do you use DDG?
Not for me, it's not. The quality of Google search results for me has been falling for years now. These days, DDG and Google are about equally good on that score.
I suspect that it's because Google tries to tailor my search results to what it thinks I'm looking for rather than just giving me the results I actually asked for, and it's really, really terrible at it.
Lastly, I love that I can dump random searches from my weird brain into DDG without the feeling that I'm giving some random machine, data that at some point can tell someone what I may want or do or have searched. Everyone knows what you're doing on the toilet, everybody poops, but we still close the door for privacy.
I love Here Maps too, it's good to have alternatives to Google products.
I'd expect DDG to not send my IP address or browser info to yandex. Is that not the case?
I also think the name DuckDuckGo is too long and too cumbersome, they should consider rebranding to something simpler. Branding matters.
One Google with thousand tentacles...
If you look at their website, Mapbox is all about "live" location data, insights, etc. The days of them just being a provider of nice services built around (mostly) open data are probably over. They have a huge userbase and can leverage all that data to do powerful things.
This is terrible...
The only way they promote themselves is only by comparing DuckDuckGo to Google
The flip side with Mapbox is that they probably weren't collecting any less data either.
Edit: which is a fallback to Mapbox, no Apple Maps feature.
Not over privacy stuff (I don't trust Apple that much either), but because Apple maps just sucks. Unless things changed within the last 4 months, Apple Maps couldn't accurately navigate me from Custer State Park to Mt. Rushmore (which really isn't far).
(We currently use Analytics on our homepage, but have plans to replace that on our next iteration.)
Not even a month ago I made a search for a famous place in Lisbon (you know, big metropolitan area, capital of Portugal, 11th-most populous urban area in the European Union) and Apple Maps didn’t even know it existed. Made the search in DDG and it found it, from where I had to copy the address and manually search for it in Maps.
Or I could’ve used Google Maps in one try, but I genuinely want DDG and Apple Maps to succeed so I keep trying. But please do use the best data of both, don’t replace one with the other.
Isn't that basically just Google Maps? I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'.
What does Apple Maps do better? Genuinely curious.
> I thought Apple Maps' data was just a subset of Google Maps'
They must be different datasets; I doubt Google would want to give Apple any data, or data Apple would take it. I will mention that once I have found one place in Apple Maps that was not in Google Maps. It was a small hostel in Europe.
That being said, I still search for places in google maps, and just plug the address into apple maps.
Actions like this, the fact that DDGs core components are still proprietary and the freezing of DuckDuckHack just kinda make me think DDG sometimes cares more about the PR than its users.
Don't get me wrong I do think DDG does a good job at providing a good search engine service that respects its users' privacy. It just bothers me that (almost) no one around here seems to care about freedom.
It's a similar thing with Apple, with the exception that Apple actively goes against even the most basic freedoms by forbidding sideloading (if that's still happening), forbidding the GPL on the App Store and being in control of the whole stack - from hardware to software - on almost every platform they have, amongst others.
I'm not saying you need to love freedom but it's a good thing to have, so why not propagate it alongside with privacy? And if you don't do it for yourself, do it for those who care about their freedom.
Google uses my data to target ads at me but doesn’t actually give any of my data to its ad-buying customers. Apple doesn’t do this but is obliged to turn over my iCloud data to the government with a subpoena.
Since this is really the scenario we should be most concerned about and since all tech companies are required to comply with the law it seems to me that the only way to have any meaningful online privacy is to not use cloud services from any vendor.
[0] Obviously I have no idea if this is the case.
[1] As if they needed any.
Scrolling with shift (!?) doesn't work at all in my FF.
I can't change the search term on the map page...
The satellite view doesn't have street names (????!)
Edit: the link I click is a yelp.com link. Why are we even talking about Apples privacy here and not yelps?
What a horrible step back...
Are you sure you're not in hybrid view?
The behaviour works fine for the MapBox maps.
I also can't drag the map around or click on any items on the map. Really inferior experience so far.
Did you find a way to switch back to the Mapbox maps?
What is a maps.app?
Total usability fail here. Very disappointed in DDG :(
Don’t see why DDG (a search engine) should run an email-service, nor vica-verse really.
That sounds like it violates the nature in which DDG wishes to brand itself. It seems DDG does not want to be the next centralized data platform (this kills their brand of privacy). The one product they already provide - search - is often times not better than Google results. They rather let you choose which search provider you want to use with their bangs system.
> as long as gmail dominates email and business email the privacy argument is largely irrelevant
I know Gsuite exists, but I have personally seen more instances of Office 365 than Gsuite for business in the wild. Not that Microsoft is any more privacy-friendly... just saying that I don't believe Google dominates business email.
I'm looking forward to the day when people know what they are talking about.I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. Open source is not the same as privacy-friendly.
Apple makes privacy a core-tenet of their product. I do not see the same stance from Mapbox.
Mapkit JS took me by surprise when it came out. But so far, it seems to have been a solid decision, especially at a time when many were looking for new solutions after Google Maps changes finally rolled out. And for the most part it looks pretty good.
(Disclosure: I work for Google but not on Maps, opinions mine and not my employer, etc etc. I wish I didn't have to write this so often.)
- I cannot search?! I can only search on DuckDuckGo, THEN click on the map tab and see a SINGLE location, no similar locations or whatever. And then I cannot in the map tab search? How ridiculous is that? Now I need to do a completely new DuckDuckGo search, hope that it will magically find the street or whatever I search, even if there are multiple ones in the same city. - I cannot look for directions from A to B?! When I click the "Directions" button I get redirected to bing.com, which is currently blocked to a 100%. I don't want to go to bing, I want to get DIRECTIONS, on the DuckDuckGo map tab and not on another website. - I cannot even ZOOM, wtf? I keep using the mouse wheel and nothing happens! This thing is so broken.
And this is only the first visit of the map tab. How they f'ed that up, omg.
I dont see why this was needed - it is a regression in terms of usability and performance (loading performance - cant comment on quality of the maps just yet, but I understand from others that the map data is woeful).
Really disappointed. I used to recommend DDG to everyone, but this feels like a sell-out - without any justification for why they've done it, my mind just leaps to conclusions about marketing and trying to get "cool points".
(I don't work for Apple and I run a competitor to Mapbox.)
And the colours! All features seem to bleed into their low-contrast pastel neighbours.
This doesn't feel like a proper match for DuckDuckGo at all.
Because it sucks. Isn’t that obvious? There’s no point in having a feature that nobody uses. I switched to DDG a few months ago and this has always been the one weakness. This is really good news IMO. Apple maps has come a long long way since launch, and their data is about on par with Google at this point.
You can argue all day that of course it’s still a commercial company. But I’d rather compromise and hitch my wagon to the folks that are outwardly explicitly drawing out their commitment to privacy, whose incentives I understand and trust.
I do believe it when Apple says they're respecting their users' privacy, just like I believe it when DDG says that. But I am disappointed when I see how these companies neglect freedom and how so few of their users care about it.
I tried finding an address recently on Google Maps, and just couldn’t find it, only to discover that that street was added 4 years ago, so ofc Google (with data from 2011) didn’t have it. OSM had it.
No surprise the blog post highlights how easy to use this integration is...in Cupertino.
Not in Portugal, or most places in Europe where I’ve tried it. They are so far behind it’s not even funny.
I know that the quality is not everywhere as good as there, but the quality varies for the other Map products too. So if it 'sucks' or the other thing 'sucks' greatly depends on where you currently are.
Reporting from Washington, DC: nope.
In California maybe.
Everywhere else? Not even close.
Edit: request are succeeding for me now.
The maps themselves are just difficult to visually parse, and unpleasant to look at compared to Google Maps and Apple Maps (which look comparably attractive at a glance). I dunno if that's solvable using a third party OSM service provider or not, but to me it seems like a good enough reason to switch.
Approximately everyone is using a third-party OSM service, since the OSM project does not provide map tiles for general use.
I also strongly disagree on your other criticism of the most common style, but that's a matter of taste. To me, they look more like a proper city map is supposed to look, and provide more detail that's useful for me to orient myself. If I were typically doing long car drives, I might prefer Google, but I don't.
Implementation of OSM stuff is horrible and usability as well. I LOVE free software and my privacy is very important to me - so I switched everything to self-hosted and encrypted solutions. Except maps. I still use google maps for a lot of navigating just because other solutions are really inconvenient to work with.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/9km62p/apple_maps_tran...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs/mapkit_js...
I think it achieves that by leveraging color theory and CSS filters.
Once you try it you cannot go back :)
I am not involved in development nor devs are friends of mine, I just think it didn't get all the exposure it deserves.
PS if you're on chrome, after installing Darker Reader the infamous chrome white flash problem will mess with your eyes... Following thread has a partial solution to that:
Here is how it looks on my machine: https://i.imgur.com/rpCiJSA.jpg
You'll get dark mode everywhere, automatically, with good looking dark colors.
I think it does that by leveraging color theory and CSS filters.
I have given up on Apple Maps long time ago and I have given up on DDG after many failed attempts.
I am using Qwant https://lite.qwant.com/ which is surprisingly good for general search terms and embarrassing for specialized search terms (like programming and such).
According to Wikipedia, they still pipe your searches through Bing except for FR/DE (though anonymized), and it's not who the backend search engine is there.
I am happily using Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and Apple Maps instead of their Google equivalents—even though I was perfectly happy with them for the most part—just to do what little I can to ensure continued competition in these spaces.
Yeah, Apple Maps isn’t as good as Google Maps in many regards. But it’s been improving, and it’s honestly not that much worse for the overwhelming majority of my use cases, to the point where I don’t even notice except a handful of times per year. And I can always fall back to the Google product if I absolutely have to.
Maybe things changed, but that wasn't that long ago. And we all know that once a product falls (and pretty hard), it is harder to recover.
Maybe 40% of my city is missing (top-20 in the US) including absolutely everything in my neighborhood other than a couple parks and churches. It gets my address to the correct block (between X and Y Aves) but that's it. Some small towns around me barely exist, others are absolutely complete.
You'll probably do ok in SF/NYC/LA/Chicago etc, but it gets really spotty beyond that.
OSM is becoming pretty impressive too. Even smaller towns here in Sweden are decently mapped. A huge difference compared to just five years ago¹, far greater difference than since Apple Maps was launched as far as I can tell. Apple Maps launched in a better state, yes, but not in a good state, and I think it's been moving slowly since then. OSM launched in a minimal state but are moving forward like a maglev train.
¹ Also visualized here: https://labs.mapbox.com/ten-years-openstreetmap/
I believe it is a user's right to share the software and configuration they use to help out their neighbour and for that they need to be able to share copies of the software.
Lastly, I obviously believe it is a user's right to run the software wherever they want.
So yeah, free software is a right in my opinion, like freedom of information and free speech. Unfortunately, not many companies care about it (yet).
You're also right in the point that DDG not setting OSM as the default map provider won't actually hurt OSM, really. But it does piss me off a bit when a company always talks about how "privacy friendly" and "open source" they are yet they completely dismiss the (related) freedom aspect. Because "privacy" and "open source" are just the buzzwords the media is talking about.
Does DDG not know about freedom? Does DDG not care about freedom? Why? I know they probably have a good reason for that and good intent in what they're doing but without having an answer to these questions, it just looks like they're grabbing the low hanging fruit sometimes.
Apple must of course comply with a subpoena, but it can only hand over data it holds the keys to. The iOS Security whitepaper[1] goes into some details. Any encryption keys that are stored in iCloud Keychain "share[] the security characteristics of iCloud Keychain—the keys are available only on the user’s trusted devices, and not to Apple or any third party." This is used for some, but not all, categories of iCloud data today—iMessage transcripts, for instance, are safe only if you do not use iCloud Backup.
1: https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
Your post makes it sound like Google targeting ads to you and Apple complying with legal data requests happen with the same frequency, which is obviously false, and definitely is a difference in practical terms for the everyday user.
According to Apple's transparency report[2], they gave data up in 2,088 account requests in the United States in the first half of 2018.
2: https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...
I deleted my Facebook account because Facebook actually has sold user data to third parties.
I'm not even sure this level of anonymized usage is possible with google's APIs.
Edit: I just had the experience of trying to use biking directions in google maps the other day. In order to enable actual turn-by-turn directions I had to turn on something called "Web and App activity" which, as best as I can tell, is an unbelievably invasive set of technologies designed to track you across websites, real locations, and non-google owned apps using google APIs.
There's a real and meaningful difference in the amount and depth of the data collected by google vs. its competitors. I think a huge motivating factor for why google collects that data is their ad-driven revenue model.
To tie it back to your original question: Sure we could all just not use cloud services but in the mean time there are clear differences in how vulnerable you are to privacy violations by nation-states through legal means based on how much data various cloud services are actively trying to collect on you.
I agree with you, but Google is way more aggressive in its data collection behavior than apple and i am getting sick of that.
I have been using Google maps this past month and i noticed some dark patterns :
- after getting directions from `your current location` when you deactivate your location services and switch apps, google maps will delete the directions and resets to the page that asks you to chose a `from` location, now you have to give google your current location to get those directions back.
- you cannot get your `current location` without internet enabled, even when you have `location services` enabled.
With iOS I only get iOS or jailbroken iOS. Not really satisfying, but Google made an open source kernel into a proprietary mess of literal spyware.
Are you suggesting Google doesn’t also have to do this?
Seems like you need to store all your data locally or encrypted on your own servers if you really want privacy.
For a long time (in internet time), Apple Maps were clearly inferior to Google Maps.
These days, it's more nuanced. In some geographies they have parity. In a select few, Apple is ahead. For most, though, Google is better.
For speed and privacy reasons, I check Apple Maps first. If I don't find what I'm looking for, then I go to Google Maps and follow up by force-quitting Google Maps when I'm done.
google maps is the only google service i still use on a regular basis because it's clearly better than apple maps for me (california mostly). apple maps is ok for simple use cases like finding a known business, but an ambiguous search on google maps is almost always better, as is their routing.
i'd love to find a better mapping service for these more complicated use cases so i can avoid google altogether.
Where I live but the Southern US Apple Maps is almost as good as Google Maps. Public Transport isn’t quite as good with Apple maps in my city.
There are already alternatives for every Google product, most of them objectively better.
The only thing keeping you locked into Google is you.
If DDG implemented their own set of apps, I wouldn't object -- but it wouldn't be anything that I'd actually use, either.
But there is definitely some edit crowd sourcing, it may just suffer from a smaller or less motivated user base. Speaking of the latter, I've never seen Apple really try to incentivize it either, whereas at least at one point Google had a fairly fleshed out actual gamification for Google Maps where people could sign up to be "Local Guides", earn points for constructive actions, and get badges that could be publicly displayed. Essentially free for Google (dunno if they ever gave anything else to top editors for PR, but they didn't promise it) but even simple public recognition of an icon can be surprisingly motivating for a lot of people. I don't know how active that still is and also vaguely remember stories about editing tools getting shut down a few years back, but at any rate Apple has never really tried anything like that at all AFAIK. Not that as a corporate culture they've ever really gotten gaming, period.
Used that in the past and got a notification when suggestion was accepted & pushed to the map.
I’d guess it’s curated somehow.
What I really hate are mall locations. I wish pin markers put the actual stores in the right portion of the building(s) themselves... hate parking on the wrong side of the complex to find out that I parked on the wrong side. Increase that to when the temperatures are more extreme (under 40F in the north or over 100F in the southwest).
This is affecting everybody using DDG.
That hasn't ever been true with Apple Maps (to my knowledge, but absolutely not true now.)
Here's a bit on Apple Maps's current situation:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
It would probably make a lot of sense for Apple though, and I'm sure they'd convince more Apple loyalists to switch to DDG from Google by putting their name on it.
I've also found the mapping aspects to be ok, but the search results are truly abysmal in comparison to Apple Maps. Point-to-point direction finding is of course a solved, commoditized technical problem this point. But the real special sauce is in combining that with real time traffic info and highly relevant local search results, which Apple does far better than any open source offering I've seen.
So does DDG.
It's very pastellish.
Your anecdote is completely irrelevant, I'm not sure why you bothered to bring it up, since you're talking about data, while I'm talking about design.
If it was just me being too used to Google Maps, why don't I feel the same way about Apple Maps?
It's not very convincing if I just argued the opposite and you don't bother giving a single counter argument. What's more is that it makes me feel there is no point talking about it if logical arguments don't convince you for no apparent reason.
> Your anecdote is completely irrelevant, I'm not sure why you bothered to bring it up, since you're talking about data, while I'm talking about design.
I am talking about design. If you zoom in on Google maps, the data is mostly there (osm also has more data, sure, but that's not universally true on the planet (though on average, per square kilometer, osm easily beats Google, but that's a blog post I'm saving for another day)). Google just hides all the data except a few random roads and random shops or something. You literally have to zoom in until your screen covers the area of two buildings before it shows you what's in the building. Somehow I'm supposed to have an overview of a city from the sparsely populated view. OSM (though you can have any style you like, I'm going for what I see most frequently) just dumps all the data it had on your screen at almost any zoom level (below province sized zoom) and you can see details like building outlines and shop icons from quite far up.
> If it was just me being too used to Google Maps, why don't I feel the same way about Apple Maps?
Maybe Apple maps is very similar to Google maps? If that holds, I should not be able to use apple maps (just like I can't use Google maps very well), but last time I tried to open it in a browser it told me to buy an apple device first so I can't compare. I don't know the answer to your question.
It was definitely not easy giving up the convenience of integrations you got with Google, the small things. In the end apple maps suck compared to Google and if you want to look for a restaurant well would you rather give your info to Yelp/foursquare than Google? So Google maps it is.
After a bit you get used to it, apple does scratch your privacy itch by showing things like when an app is using your location.
Then after three years I had to upgrade, I was like that was grest, but fuck me if I have to shell out 10 Benjamins for a fucking phone when I can get an as good phone (everything except privacy) for half that price. I just purchased a Galaxy S9 and finally remembered how much I used to like Android.
Moral of the story is, if you're anything like me, you'll eventually be like fuck it Google take my data give me a cheap good phone.
You don't have to. iPhone 8 and even 7 works well even today and unlike most Android OEMs including Google, you will get updates for at least 4 years easily. You been a 6s user, you already know that.
Having said all that, I just checked some of the entries I made way back when, which I did with full write ups, my source, photos, and in one case I was in fact the business head of IT and provided that from my work email and a device on our business Apple ID even. And I'm positive those were accepted and on the map for at least 6 months while I was still there. Yet now I look and nothing, and they definitely are still in business at the same location. That's kind of a crappy. If Apple accepts user submissions but then blows them away from time to time during map source fusion say it could explain some of their paucity of data and would discourage more submissions from those few who bothered in the first place.
Arguably, a key part of Apple's success is that they don't behave like Microsoft.
Surely DuckDuckGo has implemented their own search engine, crawler and indexer apart from other providers?
It may seem like splitting hairs, but I believe it's entirely reasonable to collect useful data on the marketing site vs collecting data via the services our customers pay for (and are used primarily by those who are not our direct customers).
There's also a difference between aggregated data (e.g., number of page hits / avg time spent on page) and PII (e.g., IP addresses, browser fingerprinting).
Another big argument for supporting free software solutions is to do it for the people who want/need freedom (like whistleblowers or activists).
You are still free to do that with OSM. Not sure what that has to do with DDG. Just because they don't want to use OSM, doesn't change any of your rights to using OSM.
> Apple on the other hand is hoarding its information.
You are free to requisition a fleet of mapping vehicles, drones and satellites and gather your own maps information and share it with whomever you want. If Apple is the one paying a ton of money to create their information, I'm not sure why it's surprising that they want to use that information in their products.
You don't have a right to Apple's mapping data any more than you have a right to Colonel Sanders's chicken recipe -- however, nothing is stopping you from making your own chicken recipe and sharing it with whomever you want. You could even start a community around sharing chicken recipes. That some people don't care about chicken recipe secrecy doesn't harm your rights to enjoy chicken with recipes created and shared by you or your friends. Some of us actually just want to buy some fried chicken and not worry about the provenance of the recipe. We have more important priorities (for us) than the openness of a private company's chicken preparation secrets. We just want good tasting chicken. Many of us aren't chicken enthusiasts, spending our time lamenting the secrecy of the Colonel's chicken choices.
What it really sounds like the source of your complaint is that if DDG doesn't continue to use OSM, then perhaps OSM will suffer for it. If that's the real origin of your disdain for this decision, then perhaps OSM isn't as valuable in the marketplace of ideas as people might think it is. However, if this actually doesn't affect OSM (I don't think it does,) then that means that DDG can use whatever they want and the OSM folks can happily share to their heart's content.
I'm not saying Apple does nothing for the open source scene. In fact, they're maintaining some important projects (like WebKit). But when you have billions of dollars that you don't know what to do with stored in some offshore haven, you could do a bit more.
No. They have their own crawler but it's only used for Instant Answers and other widget stuff.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing.
So in other words, all organic search results come from Bing and Oath.
EDIT: This is an honest question, not snark. I'd appreciate an honest answer instead of a blind drive-by downvote. I don't learn anything about why a thin UI layer over a bunch of search engines I can access directly is useful for privacy if you just downvote my comment.
Hell, why do you think google invested so much time into image compression tech to save a few bytes here and there.
But I agree Apple has consistently advertised their focus on privacy and backed it up with their actions.
I hope for the sake of the Internet that one day discussions about privacy aren’t needed because it’s the default everywhere. Then everyone wins. :)
My point is it isn't as back and white as companies claiming to protect privacy. At the end of the day Apple is just as bad.
but they haven't built a better mousetrap, and they're up against the greatest mousetrap ever known to mankind
Even Search has become markedly less useful, a common story around here, to the point where even nonbubbled proxied Startpage.com searches are disappointing.
Maps becomes less reliable all the time from a user perspective (in my immediate region, to cover my ass I guess).
Chromecast and YouTube, in general and in conjunction, have become...bloated, buggy, user-tracking-first embarrassments of their original versions...don't get me started on Gmail.... if you're gonna take all my info, at least be good at your services. Especially the ones I pay for.
Even having 1-5% of the search market is a pretty great business. Not everyone needs to be Google-scale to be a success.
Only because they are small? That seems to imply that if they ever get big, they’ll no doubt become evil, privacy-wise. Apple proves that does not have to be the case.
But DDG is primarily funded by search, and the search business is funded by ads, which are more valuable based on targetting quality, which is improved by... data. About the unique user, specifically. For DDG to grow while maintaining search as it’s primary business, it’s difficult to imagine them not eventually (or at least, being heavily incentivized to) approach/mimic google-style of data collection — because data collection is their money maker.
Apple is unique amongst FAANG in being non-data-reliant, from the start; they never had strong incentives to turn to it, and took the opportunity to stand against it, improving their primary business without any immediate loss (they’re hit by opportunity cost for it, but otherwise).
Apple was part of the PRISM program.
Apple is a hardware company from the start, their strategy has been fixed long before other Internet companies figured the value of customer data.
Their narrative of being privacy enforcer aids their strategy of building closed systems.
I'm not telling Apple is deceiving its customers with the privacy narrative, but it isn't a guardian of privacy either; if it was it wouldn't have entered CHINA like other comments have pointed out.
Any company who's business revolves around online ads will be tempted to invade your privacy.
See: http://peakads.org
By handing over all iCloud data of Chinese users to the Chinese government?
You surely must be jesting!
I think a closer analogy is health food companies advertising that misrepresents the benefits of organic foods.
When you’re deeply in the underdog position I think that style is ok, but at a certain point it becomes a bit gross.
Is this opinion or fact?
And thus stand out for targeting purposes regardless.
DDG satisfies most of my searches on the first go, and I’ve never had success with !g after a failed DDG query.
Furthermore, the Google results has a cluttered design with sparse information, so it takes much longer to figure out that I haven’t found what I’m looking for.
I’d say Google is the one failing to compete on search quality. At one point they did, but now Google’s consumer products compete on brand awareness and price, which they can only do because of their conquests in the advertising industry. Most people are not Google’s customer, they are part of Google’s enterprise product: the attention of people whose data profiles meet various requirements.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...
Perhaps other search engines will reach this extreme level of creepy behavior in the future, but Google is there today.
> In addition, Google does not know what products people bought.
Apple shared all their iCloud user data (messages, pics, docs, etc.) and keys with the Chinese government last year. [1] Apple even updated their TOS forcing Chinese users to agree to it or drop service. [2]
Google got flak for just considering it with Dragonfly, but Apple actually did it.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
They shared all their Chinese users' iCloud data. It's a huge distinction and I feel like you paraphrased it deliberately to try to make Apple appear to have sold out all of their users worldwide. While what they did in China is terrifying in general, it doesn't compromise security for any Apple user outside of China as you very strongly implied it did.
Here's the very first sentence from the link you posted (emphasis mine):
> A state-owned telecommunications company in China now stores the iCloud data for Apple’s China-based users.
He's very clear in shareholder calls / letters and in their privacy policy. So much so that he even calls out the competition[1] for doing it as Apple does not. From an economics standpoint, Apple doesn't make money on your data. They sell you overpriced but quite sophisticated hardware and became one of the most valuable companies in the world doing this. That and he advocates for a US equivalent of the GPDR[2] which absolutely and directly would impact the bottom line of companies like Google and Facebook.
Then there is Apple's official privacy policy, where they are very explicit that they don't gather personal information to sell to advertisers. In much of the non-US world, saying that and not following that is blatantly illegal.
[1] http://time.com/5433499/tim-cook-apple-data-privacy/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18017842/tim-cook-data-p...
If that's the same philosophy now, Apple is definitely better than Google in terms of privacy.
Full disclosure: I own an Android device and no Apple product except an iPod from 2009 or so.
Google are an advertising company. The overwhelming majority of their revenue is from targeted advertising. Their ability to harvest user data is the primary factor affecting their bottom line.
For Apple, privacy is a no-brainer. It doesn't harm either of their primary revenue streams and it gives them a substantial point of differentiation against their main competitor. Apple have an ongoing commercial imperative to improve the privacy of their products and services; Google have an ongoing commercial imperative to the contrary.
Maybe it's all for show, but they seem to take privacy seriously.
Yes routes from Apple maps, may appear longer or more convoluted at first glance. However after using it ( due to CarPlay) for a while on routes I had previously regularly done using google maps, I inferred a reasoning for that.
On the ~90 minute journey to my in-laws, the predicted journey time, is generally advertised as being quicker on google, but in practice the time difference is marginal.
What was different in my experience anyway, is that Apple maps seems to try to minimize left turns where appropriate. The benefit being a noticeably less stressful journey.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Then again, Apple Maps (on DuckDuckGo) seems to think I that want my maps labelled in Indonesian, so you may still have a point.
If Apple wants to focus more on services it makes sense to onboard people into using their APIs and challenging Google on this developer front too.
However, it is nowhere as effective as commercial services. So much that the most effective way of finding pirate stuff is often to Google them despite all the copyright takedowns.
I have seen products over labelled like the low carb steak or the sugarfree water. These products were always low carb or sugarfree.
DDG attacking google tells us they are shooting for number 2. Attacking google provides free advertising. It also tells us if they get bigger they will double down on being different from google so the chance they will suddenly turn against privacy is unlikely. If it does happen funding is running out.
iMeasage, the one be thing that really matters in this case, encrypts it's chats "end to end" but using keys managed centrally by Apple, regardless of your iCloud sync situation, and manages them in a way that can't inspected by users. If a decrypted copy of all your encrypted chats is being sent to a government sink, there is no way for you to know or prevent it.
China cares about being able to intercept and decrypt your communication, they want to be able to identify and punish political threats. That's a service that Apple CAN provide to the Chinese government for all iPhone customers.
Regardless what your view is, are you seriously suggesting companies should break the laws of the countries they operate in?
Before you say: “unjust laws, yes!” Consider what laws Chinese consider unjust, should they be allowed to break them within the US?
I would err on the side of: if you don’t agree with the values of a country then don’t offer your services. Capitalism, of course puts no value on values, so profit is the only ethical code a business should follow (logically).
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
This company is:
1) Apple?
2) Google (project Dragonfly)?
Well, Microsoft's test completely backfired on me. I ran the test many times. In most cases, one of the columns had clearly better results, and 80+% of the time, that column was Google.
Small sample size to be sure, but it covers 100% of the population I care about in choosing a search engine (me).
Granted, this was Bing, not Google, but I kind of doubt DDG would fare better. (And in non-blind tests, I definitely fell I'm getting the worst results from DDG).
And I also pretty much never have to use !g. DDG results are sufficient most of the time, and when they are not, I notice Google usually also fails to provide satisfactory results.
I like ddg, i support them, but for any but the most basic queries google is a solid tier above.
For example, CC companies could give you your itemized purchase history for Macy's on your statement, if they wanted to.
Credit card companies have wanted itemized transactions for aaages (it's even part of the protocols they use) for fraud prevention, but very few merchants have agreed.
NSA can't change the fundamental laws of the universe. While cryptology and mathematics is constantly advancing, there hasn't been a fundamental breakage of a block cipher in ages, nor has any evidence emerged to suggest the fundamentals of RSA will be broken.
Computing power alone isn't enough to break todays strong cryptography, and its certainly possible that the underlying math is a constant of the universe.
Edit: Not to mention the snowden leaks suggests that the NSA spends most of their effort subverting implementations rather than the fundamental mathematics.
Dragonfly is a censored search engine, not a user data base.
Dragonfly was complying with China's firewall, because clicking broken links in search results sucks, but it was also linking every search query to the users phone number and sharing with the Chinese government, which is what Google employees revolted over.
[1] https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
GPs comparison was privacy between the two companies, and one cares more about selling in China than the privacy of it's users.
I'm not defending Apple WRT their data privacy practices in China; as I said it's terrifying and hopefully not a stepping stone. I was simply calling GP out for deliberately misrepresenting their own citation to make a false equivalence.
If you think there are privacy issues that are more important than that then list them.
Edit: Wikipedia link to original poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
Apple states "All of the user’s registered devices display an alert message when a new device, phone number, or email address is added." So no, it's not correct to say key management is out of your visibility.
[1] https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....
And now that you've brought this discussion into ad hominem territory, it has lost any relevance to the actual topic at hand. Peace.
...but is also more than happy to meet and shake hands with the leaders of those repressive regimes? Like the UAE, which criminalizes sodomy and deports those who identify as LGBT?
https://www.thenational.ae/uae/government/abu-dhabi-crown-pr...
Is it possible Apple, like Tim Cook, has the occasional double standard?
He can't change the government of the UAE.
He can change Apple's security and privacy priorities.
This must blow your mind: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnyoobserv...
The reply would have been better without the first paragraph.
Regardless, Apple do collect lot of personal data. And even if they don't sell it or use it for marketing now, they could still potentially lose control of it, or change their policies down the road.
The safest approach from a privacy perspective is not to collect the data in the first place.
I believe the point was that he was advocating for a cause which doesn't benefit him or directly affect him. I think it's a valid point: it's easy to fight for things that benefit you. It's like you'd be less skeptical if a rich person fights for higher taxes on the rich than when a poor person does.
I know most people don't pay them any attention but I'm really not sure you could find a more customer-focused privacy policy. I've yet to find one and I would guess I've read at least 10x as many privacy policies as the average person. Everything from what their disclosures say to how they've structured them to be easily read, easily understood, and (dare I say) engaging is indicative of just how much they prioritize user-privacy.
edit: meant non medical
Still, good point!
You can just say gay.
-- Signed, The Gays
-- Signed, totally a friend of the Gays
For example they continuously collect GPS position + list of WiFi APs from iPhone users to build their crowd-source'd wifi location database: "To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. Where available, location-based services may use GPS, Bluetooth, and your IP Address, along with crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations, and other technologies to determine your devices’ approximate location."
They also state: "We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising, and for loss prevention and anti-fraud purposes."
It's quite eye opening to compare how Apple's marketing describes their privacy policy vs. how Apple's legal describes it.
For client-side Google software like Android/Chromium at least we got to fork and remove the evil bits; we have built thriving communities based on that and everyone's got an alternative to Google. In the case of iOS/Safari do we trust Apple-provided binaries solely based on claimed policy / reputation?
So, does it really matter if Apple doesn't directly operate their advertising business and instead outsources it?
We should be more clear in distinguishing various levels of attacks to privacy.
You are seemingly suggesting that they do Google-style data collection where data is attached to a specific user. It’s a disingenuous interpretation of their privacy policy (both the marketing version and the legal version.)
https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...
What should actually be eye opening is how Apple actually does protect privacy. They should be applauded and not condemned.
Good on Apple and DDG for realising that privacy has value and using that to grow their product.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (scroll down to "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives")
Hmmm.
The closest might be recommendation systems, but afaik even Netflix only collects from its own information pools, and the main chunk of it is probably for their custom shows; Amazon definitely doesn't track that much data about their users, because their recommendation system might actually be useful if it did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apple_Inc._services
Not sure how it works, but whatever I see on Amazon shows up as ads on Facebook.
A real concern for privacy has only ever existed in the open source world, and google and apple have effectively crushed that threat.
As is, many of the Mac diehards I know have migrated their kids off the platform in the past year or two, and some have made the leap themselves. Its a sea of change from just a few years ago.
Also keeping an internal profile of registered user is very different from squeezing every cent of advertising out all available user data
But Apple's privacy policy is very clear that they do share user data and they do use personal information for advertisement purposes: "Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising."
Does Apple collect less data than Google? Almost certainly, Google is crazy good at it. But are they still collecting data and using it for targeted advertising? According to their own privacy policy YES, yes they are. Including tracking people on their websites: "Apple’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches."
Seriously, just read Apple's privacy policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
It really doesn't match their heavy privacy-first marketing push of late.
And for things like Siri it's hard to imagine that they aren't going to get increasingly creepy on the data collection aspect of things. It's sort of necessary to build out a "real" assistant. Asking things like "What time is my flight?", which is a useful feature, requires it to know when your flight is. Which you probably didn't manually tell it, because that's not very assistant-y, but instead it had to crawl your emails to find it. That ends up being creepy data collection. They could do it purely on-device, but then your homepod can't answer the same question, which breaks the magic. Unless they build some way for the homepod to ask all your other Apple devices. But if all your devices form a collective network that can share data about you between each other is it really "purely local" anymore? And what stops Apple from joining in on that mesh network whenever they want?
On your second point, they Tim Cook has already said on their earnings calls that they could have monetized user data if they wanted to and chose not to. In fact they built Apple Maps at huge cost specifically so they would not have to give personal data to Google. They've been very clear about this.
They can always choose not to operate in those countries. But they do, and accordingly making a conscious decision to endorse those laws in the name of profit.
Or are you saying that no foreign companies anywhere should do any business at all in China and no tourists should go there because doing so and obeying the laws is tantamount to taking personal responsibility for them?
By extension, I suppose this means that, by not breaking them, you are personally endorsing every law of the country in which you currently reside, or any countries you have or will ever visit?
https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...
2 if you're making that point, there's still a difference between action and omission. Nobody would held you accountable if you don't actively try to topple a murderous regime, but if somehow it's laws require to participate in the stoning of a person, well, maybe you should grab a ticket to home instead of a stone, or at least is expected for you to weight the situation, not just shrug and quote: "well, it's the law".
What Apple is doing is more like visiting a country and being told you either have to participate in stoning someone or pay a fine, and they are paying the fine. That's why they won't operate iCloud services in China, which will instead be run by a Chinese company which Apple will have to pay for the service.
