A reminder: many people are out to mislead you and profit from it.
I don't want to give any named or relations, but there is someone I know who is always listening to contentious podcasts and YouTube videos. I'm not speaking of someone I interact with on Hive, this person is from real life, so don't worry I'm not talking about you ;)
This person is always talking to be about these terrible things he hears. Just recently, it was about Apple.
Did you know that Apple gives any company that wants full access to all your files?
Uhm... no they don't.
But this podcast said they do and this is a very trustworthy person.
I don't care who it is—he's wrong or mistaken. Not only does Apple not give any access to companies unless you explicitly give permission by hitting "yes" to a popup after you install the app and run it for the first time, but many companies including Google and Facebook are still angry at Apple for this and they beg users to give them access, claiming in their permissions popups that their apps won't work unless you give them access, which is a complete lie designed to trick you into giving them access to your more of your phone.
But Apple is a closed operating system, so we have to trust them, while Android is open-source so we can see exactly what they are doing.
There are a lot of lines of code in Android. Even programming experts can't possible audit it all to check everything. There are entire security companies who try to audit the Android code. Also, that open-source potential works against Android sometimes: for example, apps are always figuring out ways around security that Google implements. Due to this most security companies place Android as less secure than iOS.
But it's open!
Do you want freedom or security? These are two ends of a scale, so you can't have both at 100%. You pick what you want, but know that this podcast you listened to lied to you in an attempt to influence your judgement. Why did they lie to you? Well... after trying to push you to switching to Android by slandering Apple, did they suggest you buy their app?
Yes. But it sounds like a great app!
I'm sure it is. But there you go. "Switch to Android because Apple is evil. And by the way, give us money."
I'm not an Apple shill and am the first to agree some of the things they do are maddening, but I don't like when people use these straw man arguments to try to mislead people with the sole purpose of tricking them into buying something, or just to be angry. There is enough to be upset about in the world, why add to it by getting angry about nothing?
He listens to a lot of political podcasts too.
Biden is such a scumbag. I mean, I don't like Trump either, he should be in jail, but Biden is a bigger criminal than any of them!
And I'll ask him what was said, and just as above we'll go back and back just like the above, and it turns out the podcast he was listening to charges a shitload of money for a membership where they reveal the real secrets of "how evil Democrats really are".
I don't know about you, but I'd say the only evil ones here are the podcast snake oil salesmen who are using fear and partisanship to try to cheat people out of their money. Whether Biden is good or bad is immaterial; podcasts like this are using peoples' bias in order to make money from them, and that is immoral and disgusting.
Not to mention podcasts like this are not helping our current political environment. As long as it's my team vs your team and the other side is evil regardless of what they do, we are never going to solve anything. I miss the days when politicians actually worked together instead of vowing to defeat anything the other side does regardless of what it is and just calling each other names.
Anyway, the point is on the internet today people are out to mislead you, take advantage of you, and profit from you in some way. When anyone you read or listen to gives an extreme position, it might be worth stepping back and asking why. The moderate position is almost always the best one. When people take to the extremes they are usually being misled or are out to mislead others. I don't care what you think, but I do hope you think for yourself and always ask why when people try to push you to an extreme point of view.
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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon. |
If I could give name to our times, I'd say that we live in "The Age of Outrage."
It seems like more people than ever go looking for things they can feel outraged over, and the world is filled with sketchy content creators who are all about misleading people... all in service of another click, or another page view.
=^..^=
That's the perfect label!
While I don’t think it’s necessarily a true statement that companies like apple have access to everything, they do however have a closed system where we don’t know what they do and don’t have access to without them telling us. It’s inherently a dangerous idea to assume they don’t have access because we’ve seen with many examples that they indeed do, they just don’t have a need to.
Take tucker Carlson for example - the government got access to all of his phone conversations and knew he was going to Russia to talk to Putin. They admit it, and he’s got an apple phone. They do indeed have what they want, if they want it.
Any of these popular systems all have back doors and sell your information for profit without a second thought. Apple, Google, Microsoft. They don’t care about you, only how they can make money off you.
It’s unwise to assume otherwise.
I think it's more nuanced than that. It's true that their OS is closed so we really don't know. But we can make some assumptions from what we see. We do know that the FBI demanded they build in a backdoor to their encryption a few years ago and Apple refused, claiming that they don't have access and aren't going to rewrite their code to add a backdoor. We also know the FBI then either believed them or decided it wasn't worth trying to pressure them, so they hired a third party hacking company that claimed they knew a workaround that would give access to the info if the user hadn't enabled encryption, and it seems like their hack did work. A few weeks after that they was a story that the FBI was angry because Apple closed that workaround. But of course we can guess that behind the scenes the FBI and other government organizations are still working to gain access and may have gotten it. We might also assume that if the FBI did find another workaround to gain access to our data they wouldn't announce it to avoid Apple patching the hole.
Furthermore, a lot on the phone isn't encrypted at all. If you sync any data with Google or Dropbox, that is visible to anyone who knows how to look. And we know from news stories that both Google and Dropbox are not against selling our info. Email and SMS are visible to anyone. Apple Messanger is encrypted on both ends and again Apple claims not to have access. And again the government is pressuring Apple to open Messanger up, now opening an Anti-trust lawsuit to force them to open it up. That doesn't tell us if Apple is telling the truth about not having access, but it does suggest the gov believes them and so if taking a more forceful approach to get access.
We also have engineers who have quit Apple who make claims about the security. And there is the fact that more than any other company, Apple has staked their reputation on keeping our info private. They gain nothing by secretly going against that and they have everything to lose.
So it's yes and no. I don't know if we should assume the worst That's taking the extreme position that I argue against in my post. But we also shouldn't blindly trust and should watch to see what's going on. I also think it's probably best to avoid putting very sensitive info on our phone.
Yeah for sure, I've started to shift my stuff away from Google, regular email, SMS and others for the simple fact that I am trying to shift my stuff to be more private and privacy focused. Not because I have anything to hide but because privacy is a right and the 4th amendment to the US constitution is still law of the land, even though it gets trampled on left and right.
I was abreast of the FBI and backdoor thing years ago but didn't get the follow up that it was closed which is good, if those things are accurate. I just think that as things become increasingly digital, and the powers that shouldn't be increasingly try to gain access and monitor our every communication and move, it's best to operate on the principle that you should not trust companies like this.
For example - the CCP was having an issue a few years ago where their citizens were protesting against their draconian measures for lockdowns I believe it was, so they were air-dropping protest and other materials to people through the Airdrop feature on the phone. Then people could transmit the data without the internet itself, bypassing the CCP control grid on information. Naturally the CCP was pissed about this and I think it was a week or few weeks later Apple removed the airdrop to everyone feature without any restrictions to limiting airdrop to 5 or 10 minutes.
Complying with such a horrible government as the CCP almost immediately just raises my suspicions about Apple, and that feature is now global as part of the OS; there is no longer any airdrop to all for unlimited timeframe feature on the phones. It's the ratchet effect, it goes in the wrong direction and does not turn back.
Yeah I read about that Airdrop thing. I did read something about it that said it wasn't nearly as bad as the pundits were trying to spin it, but I honestly don't remember what was said, so I can't tell you. But for sure, just on the surface it doesn't sound encouraging that Apple did that. In some ways, companies are in a rock and a hard place. If they resist the government too much, they risk being completely shut down. Now I know that applies more to China than to the US, but it also applies in the US, just in a different way. Obey or they could sue for antitrust and try to break you apart.
I'm not trying to defend Apple in that. Like I said, I don't remember the piece that gave another side to the issue and I'm otherwise not at all informed on the issue so I don't know enough to argue. I'm just saying it is a tricky game for companies when going against the government.
The best solution for all of us would probably be a Linux phone. That OS is also too complex for any of us to really know what's going on, but there are enough trusted security people on that side that we can have some level of trust. Maybe this option will become more of a possibility in the future.
Yeah for sure, it's good to look at everything with a grain of salt! It's a bit like having to fly under the radar. You want to go a certain height to get you quickly from place A to B but you don't want to go too high or you end up being in the cross hairs of folks you may not want to be!
I think ultimately, we are probably heading in the right direction with these things - meaning yes we are having issues now but in the long-run, if things keep getting decentralized and the human race is interconnected at an increasing rate like we are now, a lot of these things are far lower of an issue.
It's just the pain of progress!
Politicians themselves don't make it any better. The low blows and personal attacks are ridiculous. I bet that thing about apple stems from some issue I recently read about where apple revealed an IP address or something like that.
Who knows. The people who love building the outrage look for any news story and then they start spinning it to make it a hundred times worse. Yeah, absolutely, politicians aren't helping. The GOP's modern thing of "we will vote against anything the Democrats do, regardless of what it is", and the Democrats starting to fall into the same just makes a perfect situation for mud-slinging instead of actually governing.
There was actually an exchange just the other day that was absolutely disgraceful. When a politician has to start kicking someone's physical appearance, it speaks volumes about who we have elected into office and also us as electors.
It's really hard to listen to Trump this or Biden that. Although I think people should take their OpSec seriously and find some good resources and not just blindly trust corporations. Verify don't trust what people say is a good way to go. Many podcasts, are really just clickbait and often just lies.
Verify but don't trust is always good. As I wrote in the post: think for yourself. I think that goes for anything. Ignore the talking heads trying to make us angry, read the news (trying to read news only and not opinion pieces), and form our own judgement.