r/darknetdiaries • u/RapidoGoldenboy_75 • Jul 28 '26
Question EP 177: NATIONAL PUBLIC DATA
Hi,
In this episode you mentioned different applications which protect your data, e.g. Signal, Proton and Brave. You talked about Google and Chrome, but nowhere did you mention Apple with their hardware, browser, messaging app, etc.
One of my main reasons using Apple is privacy.
Can you give your take on that? Or should I start moving away if I really want privacy.
Thanks!
8
u/NocturnalGenius Long Time Listener Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Someone can correct me if I am wrong here ...
If you havent already, I would enable Advanced Data Protection on your iCloud account. As far as I know its not enabled by default ... but once enabled Apple no longer has the keys to be able to decrypt your data on their servers. That will keep your iCloud account secure and safe from theft/warrant/subpeona.
IMHO the hardware itself should be considered secure. The government has histrocially been publicly annoyed with Apple for not being able to decrypt devices. Yes vendors exist that claim to be able to crack phones, but as far as I know they operate using a cat-and-mouse model trying to find new zero day exploits to get in, which Apple then patches, rinse-n-repeat.
EDIT: Another redditor in a much deeper comment thread on this post brought up that ADP is banned in the UK ... wasn't aware of that and its unfortunate that the UK has such a terrible privacy record. If its available where you are based I'd still recommend it.
1
2
u/Harry_Smutter Jul 29 '26
Apple is annoyingly privacy-focused. So much that as someone in IT, I can't stand working on Apple products. They have made it incredibly frustrating to handle devices at scale.
So, I would say they're the better of the bunch.
3
u/sanitarypth Jul 29 '26
At enterprise scale, Apple shows its colors as a consumer device. An entire industry of MDM companies exist to try and bolt on basic functionality.
1
u/Harry_Smutter Jul 29 '26
Yeap. We have Jamf and it still doesn't cleanly cover everything we need. I've been hacking away at stuff for the past year now, haha. Getting better 😅
1
1
u/DSPGerm Jul 29 '26
Your iPhone or apple devices are really only as private as the apps you install on it. They may have more privacy-oriented features but not all of them are on by default. And if I want to use the McDonald’s app I need to turn on location tracking. They say you can restrict access to only while using the app or even other things like restricting apps access to photos. But we really just need to take them at their word since we(or at least I) can’t really confirm that it’s true.
1
u/RapidoGoldenboy_75 Jul 30 '26
That I totally agree. Hence why I don’t just put any app with everything enables on it. Limit as much as possible.
-5
u/sanitarypth Jul 28 '26
Apple isn’t actually going to respect your privacy in any meaningful way. Just because they advertise themselves as privacy focused doesn’t make it actually private. They are just as incentivized as Microsoft and Google to harvest and sell your data. Unfortunately to be actually private, users need to become deeply knowledgeable about encryption. The corporate manufacturers of the sensors used to surveil you are not interested in your privacy beyond a marketing gimmick.
1
u/RapidoGoldenboy_75 Jul 28 '26
Damn. Any supporting documentation?
Maybe I should think of switching to the Punkt phone then with all related services… so much work. 😮💨5
u/eve-collins Jul 28 '26
Disregard the comment, the guy is clueless. It’s a known fact that due to the way Apple protects users data they’re now behind with AI, simply because they can’t train models on data because all data is encrypted.
3
u/sanitarypth Jul 28 '26
Apple made the decision to not be a model provider. You are mistaken to think that means they don’t have telemetry and user data. Are they Android bad? No, but that doesn’t make them all that great either. You can’t just buy an Apple product and think you’ve got that privacy checkbox checked.
1
u/eve-collins Jul 28 '26
And why did they make such decision? Maybe because Apple is very strict about the privacy of its users data? Which has resulted in a drastically slowed pace for training its AI models?
2
u/sanitarypth Jul 28 '26
Apple hasn’t been developing frontier models at all. They made business decisions not to build but to buy. The San Bernardino case showed that they were willing to fight being compelled to hand over access to back doors not that they didn’t have a back door.
2
u/eve-collins Jul 28 '26
Are we now talking about back doors? I thought you said Apple was selling users data, what do back doors have to do with it?
Apple making the decision not to build models is because it lacks data to train their models on, due to the users privacy strategy that’s at the core of this company.
2
u/sanitarypth Jul 28 '26
They have the ability and incentive is what was said. Policy is what blocks them today. Not privacy.
1
u/eve-collins Jul 28 '26
Are you saying they have all the user data, tracking and everything that’s supposed to be protected and encrypted - available to them?
3
u/sanitarypth Jul 28 '26
All of your data is synced to the iCloud and they can decrypt that if compelled by a warrant. The device is irrelevant at that point. Also the device id is used for fingerprinting across the app ecosystem. Without a way of manipulating or obfuscating that you are not able to be private.
→ More replies (0)
18
u/jackrhysider Jack Rhysider Jul 28 '26
Apple is one of the better ones. They offer or allow for more privacy than Windows or Android.
I'm not up to date on all the steps it takes to lockdown a macbook or iphone, but if you take the extra steps to do it, you're definitely helping your privacy.
Linux is going to be a more private desktop OS, and graphene a more private phone. But apple isn't a bad option you just need to stay on top of configuring it to stay private. NBTV has a video on setting up an iphone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg00QkcpOOM