Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You ask for others to provide sources to back up their comments, but don't provide any of your own.


Ignoring the fact that it's EXTREMELY easy to find links showing Apple's commitment to privacy:

https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+privacy+efforts&oq=app...

https://www.apple.com/lae/privacy/approach-to-privacy/

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989608/apple-data-down...

When you are the one making a claim refuting what is generally considered common knowledge, you're expected to provide SOME citation of your disputed claim... not to mention it's such a common internet troll tactic to spew BS just to make people do research to prove you're full of it that it's just kind of common courtesy to start with links (assuming you aren't a troll).


Equally easy to find recent articles outlining Apple is getting billions from Google to have Google search by default in Safari. Doesn’t sound fitting commitment to privacy.

http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...


While I'm sure apple's default choices are partially profit-motivated, defaulting to Duck Duck Go would be a poor UX for the vast majority of iPhone customers.

There is a valid discussion to be had as to whether UX or data privacy should be prioritized, but I'm inclined towards UX--most people just want to get the best search results possible.

If anything, on the UX <--> privacy scale, I'd argue Apple has sometimes been prioritizing privacy too highly as of late. As a heavy user of custom Applescripts, the new TCC dialogs introduced in Mojave have been causing me a lot of grief.


You can change that to DDG with a click, if you want.


What about transferring Chinese users' cloud data to a Chinese company? Is it a part of commitment to privacy too?


It’s not possible to prove a negative. Do you want a quote from Tim Cook?


>It’s not possible to prove a negative.

_Of course_ it's possible to prove a negative. Why do people insist on repeating this as if it's actually true?


Because it's shorthand for "the burden of proof is on those making the claim, and negative claims are much harder to prove or disprove." If your rebuttal to my assertion that Taylor Swift is not, in fact a zebra boils down to "you SAY that none of those zebras are secretly Taylor Swift, but maybe that just means Zebra Taylor Swift is just that good," I mean, I can't technically disprove that, but shouldn't the burden of proof be on you?


> negative claims are much harder to prove or disprove.

No, they aren't.

One, disproving a negative claim is exactly proving the opposite (positive, if the same style of expression is used) claim (and vice versa), so it can't be harder to both prove and disprove negative claims, even if they were real distinct classes.

Second, “positive” and “negative” claims are largely phrasing choices; it's quite possible to have positive and negative claims that are semantically equivalent.


If the intention is to talk about burden of proof, then that's what we should be talking about. That's clearly not the case because the parent comment replied asking how it was possible. They seemed to have meant it very literally that negatives are impossible to prove. It's a common saying and it's flatly wrong.

Additionally, in this case, the claim that a company can be trusted is much more difficult to prove than the claim that they cannot be. Burden of proof, difficulty of proof, and whether the claim is expressed as a positive or a negative have no intrinsic link.


"you SAY that none of those Apple devices are secretly spying, but maybe that just means Apple devices are spying just that good"

Are you saying that Apple can be proven a company that can be trusted to keep user data secure?


Could you educate me on how this would be achieved?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: