this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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I cannot comprehend people who agree to have a spy in their own home and they even pay for the privilege.
Its easy, people simply dont even think that it could be used to spy on them. Its just handy and funny tool. There is HUGE problem in the world with majority still naively trusting corporations to such extent saying anything to contrary seems like you are some conspiracy nut. Or if they don't trust them naively, they are so apathetic that they just think their information leaking doesnt matter, it can't be stopped anyway and that they just dont care about it.
Something really should be done to start having people care about things again, otherwise everyone will lose all rights to privacy eventually.
The worst ones know they are being spied on, but say things like they don't mind being spied on because "I have nothing to hide anyway"
I mean, I have some, because I already know my phone is spying on me even more aggressively. I don't have any illusion that I had privacy in the first place
I dont know about other models but I think I have managed to limit how much my phone (fairphone) spies on me quite decently.
I installed application called ReThink, which is basically a firewall and I can block even google services with it. I know it works because its really pain in the ass when I want to use their services like calendar and i have to temporarily unblock it. It can also block ads by completely blocking internet for programs that dont really need it. I have also removed/disabled anything extra and removed permissions to anything that absolutely doesn't need it. It also alerted me to that stupid google safetycore spyware being installed (by blocking and informing about newly installed program) so i managed to remove that immediately.
At least according to the logs the phone seems secure, since nothing is being allowed to connect anywhere that shouldn't be allowed. Can't do much to occasional breaches due to restarts or temporary allowings, but I dont think such sparse information is much use or it might require more effort to utilise.
I, too, have Rethink: DNS + Firewall + VPN installed. Prior to this I was using NetGuard.
"Pizza Over Privacy", a Stanford study... https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/pizza-over-privacy-paradox-digital-age Basically, people trade their privacy for convenience and don't consider the long term cost.
While I don't dispute the thesis, this is deeply flawed.
Why flawed?
These students are giving away someone else's email addresses. They may deeply care about their own privacy and not care about the privacy of their friends. Plus giving away just email addresses (assuming there was nothing else) for a free pizza is not necessarily any invasion of privacy as these can be simply made up.
So I wouldn't draw any conclusions from this exercise.
Also says nothing about the validity of those emails.
Sure they can have my friend börg.bö[email protected] email address.
But they did give! They did not chose to deny and not have pizza.
I think they mean morally on the part of the student
I have HomePods to activate my lights, and listen to the news in the shower. Sure, it doesn’t do all the fancy shit that Alexa does, but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.
...to keep the same amount of data for themselve.
Don't kid yourself. Apple collects the same amount as everyone else does. And if either get hacked, it doesnt matter if they keep it or sell it.
Anonymous :o
Like this? https://ads.apple.com/
Yes, in fact. That’s a good example.
The API for the ads allowed on-platform (only in their “App Store” and “News” products to my knowledge) is also used internally, which you can verify yourself by simply inspecting network traffic. The component instrumentation is obviously meager compared to the rich analytics and user behavior tracking data offered by virtually every other platform.
But the foremost restriction is granularity. Neither internal analytics nor advertisers are ever provided a persistent user identifier. The advertising ID is generated on-device and doesn’t persist with device reset. That’s unheard of on platforms like Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.
In-app tracking is allowed but subject to item by item opt-in user permission and is similarly restrictive, audited with package submission (they will reject the submission if you attempt to circumvent the API to extract more/better data from the user). What I’m describing is draconian compared to most platforms, especially carrier-manufacturer Android distributions in many countries.
I mostly use custom roms and distros personally, and I’m not even trying to convince you Apple is in some way more ethical than other big tech cos. I just don’t like seeing misinfo and hearsay spread around for any purpose, especially when that purpose is apparently bullying other users for upvotes.
They say they don’t associate the data they collect with anyone. There’s no way to trace back to my device.
That doesn't work. Data can and has been deanonymized previously. It's still very much unsafe if it falls in the wrong hands
"Oh yeah we collect data. Anonymously."
That has literally the same energy as some other user pointed out here about Valve and Gaben with their brain implant.
Gaben is the harbinger of light for many but us still a billionaire that got the money from somewhere. Thus is also evil. Just not as much as, for example, Bezos.
Apple is evil. At least equal to Google in different aspects.
Stop cheering for anti-consumer companies.
They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.
The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.
Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.
They do, so far as anyone is aware.
They do, so far as anyone is aware or can know, yes.
I said “so far” because I think continuing to test their claims remains important, as they keep making new equipment and are a large public corporation whose only moral code is increasing shareholder value.
But I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. Sorry.
I sold my Alexa devices when the Sidewalk crap came out
Still waiting for a replacement for the Echo Show though, having a smart speaker with a display was handy at times
Next up: 2+2=5
I have a theory that they understand this is wrong, but also feel the social pressure (ads work this way, remember), and thus decide to go all way in, in the most absurd ways, fully, to suppress their feeling of doing a stupid thing.
OK, not a theory, rather my experience with starting to use an Android phone
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html
Your phone is doing it too. TV too, if you have one. Don't forget about your doorbell!
Not unless they're overriding the controls for that (Which - yeah that's possible) and TV? hell no. Doorbell? Nah man it just goes ding.
Mine don't.
My phone runs open source ROMs. I don't have a TV, but I do have an nVidia streaming box -- I don't assume anything I watch there is private. My doorbell is an electromechanical device hooked to a simple wire.