Apple should double down on its privacy stand, Dan Moren writes for Macworld:
Buckle up, because we’re poised for another battle on digital security. The FBI has reputedly asked for Apple’s help unlocking phones belonging of the alleged shooter from the Pensacola air base incident last year. Apple, for its part, claims it has already turned over to law enforcement all the information [to which] it has access…
Leaving aside the dangers inherent in the creation of backdoors into the technology we all rely upon, I think this is as good a time as any for Apple to double down on its (already pretty solid) security focus. Because when it comes to digital information and our devices, what we need is not less security, but more…
And that’s going to be a challenge for the company, because one of its biggest markets — and the home of the majority of its manufacturing — is China… While it’s not financially practical for Apple to take a principled stand — even if it wants to — the company had best be looking at ways to untangle itself from China over the long term if it wants to continue making privacy and security one of its competitive advantages. Otherwise it starts to look like the company can talk the talk, but not walk the walk.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
Again, Tim Cook obviously put too many eggs in the Chinese basket and left them there for too long. Yes, we understand why it was done. Yes, it helped to save Apple. But, the move to diversify production worldwide in order to mitigate risk should obviously have begun earlier and more urgently. Apple needs to continue and step up their work to liberate themselves from communist China’s threats.
The Chinese authoritarians should never forget that Apple products need not be assembled in China.
“China is critical for Apple in every way from sales to product assembly, so Apple continues to kowtow to China. With Apple’s strong stance – in other places of the world – on users’ rights and privacy, it’s a bad look for the company and a tough tightrope that Tim Cook is trying to walk.” — MacDailyNews, July 29, 2017
Apple CEO Tim Cook sits on the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ board of directors, has a bust of RFK on his office desk, and likely knows this quote well:
“Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.” — Robert F. Kennedy
Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean millions don’t die when yet another authoritarian socialist republic implodes. Humans are really bad at learning from history, it seems. They love to repeat tragic mistakes over and over. It’d be funny, were it not for the hundreds of millions of deaths incurred.
As we wrote over a decade ago, “Business models that fly in the face of human nature are doomed to failure.”
Systems of government that fly in the face of human nature are doomed to failure, too. — MacDailyNews, October 19, 2019
Huck Yeah, and dump the screen-your-photos “for the children” program…and one’s not a perv to advocate for such.
Be the market leader in privacy, security and freedom.
Censors don’t respect freedom.
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean millions don’t die when yet another authoritarian socialist republic implodes. Humans are really bad at learning from history, it seems.”
Part of learning from history is to not misrepresent it. It is authoritarian countries of all stripes (whatever they call themselves) that are horrific. By adding the words “socialist” and “republic” MDN is making two mistakes: limiting the failure-mode to only those types of authoritarian governments and also purporting to believe the labels such governments put on themselves (usually to deceive people about their true nature).
In other words, it is simpler and more accurate to say:
“Governments that treat their people terribly fail in all kinds of horrifying ways, killing many before they eventually implode.”
Stick to making gizmos, and let the police functions be handled by the police.
Security is a problem nowadays. Some Apple products are using facial recognition systems https://recfaces.com/articles/what-is-facial-recognition-used-for to unlock the device and I’m not sure if the user’s biometric data won’t share with others. I heard a lot of rumors about that.