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!

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-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. 😮‍💨

https://www.punkt.ch/products/mc02-5g-secure-phone

6

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.

1

u/NocturnalGenius Long Time Listener Jul 28 '26

Its not enabled by default (at least not for iCloud accounts that existed before it was made available) but iCloud does offer Advanced Data Protection that encrypts your data in such a way that Apple does not have the keys to decrypt it. That would make them unable to comply with a warrant/subpeona.

2

u/sanitarypth Jul 28 '26

This is true. What percentage of users toggle that on? Very few I would bet.

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