The poor snoo look at its sad face :(

🫂

You should watch this video about how much invasive user data MacOS collects and sends (in plaintext) to Apple's servers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMc5zgALLiY

And this one, about App Store tracking and them ignoring privacy settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=016QGxOsjQY

And read this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/apple-iphone-privacy.html

E2E encryption and key data being stored only on device

That's for iMessage. And you can get identical functionality from Signal on any Android phone with a secure element (like a Pixel). They don't encrypt iCloud backups, and regularly turn that info in to the government. And, ironically, those iCloud backups include messages, which aren't stored on their servers encrypted! According to the NYT: "Apple also has access to text messages that it says are otherwise encrypted when they are backed up in iCloud, a workaround that’s apparently necessary to aid law enforcement."

it’s the best privacy story around

Not remotely. That would be GrapheneOS on a Pixel or CalyxOS on another Android phone. Apple is good in comparison to other stock vendors, sure. But it isn't the best option. Also, maybe read their privacy policy sometime: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww. It's enlightening stuff. They collect a lot, and use it for whatever they want as long as it doesn't leave Apple (or the businesses its partnered with).

They don’t make money by selling you or your data - they make money selling hardware to you.

Maybe not: "Apple is also building out its own online advertising business, portions of which a French privacy watchdog said may run afoul of European laws. The agency said that Apple doesn’t appear to require users’ consent for tracking, as it now does from other app makers, meaning it could benefit from the targeted advertising that its do-not-track feature is meant to hinder." (From the NYT article)

After all, why would a megacorporation turn down the opportunity to milk more profit out of their very captive (have you ever tried to get an Apple person to leave their walled garden?) income source? Remember, this is /c/cyberpunk lol

People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button

Apple's made privacy a fairly large part of their value offering recently.

The problem is that that's mostly marketing smoke and mirrors. They define privacy as not giving your data to third parties (who aren't subcontracted with them), not actually refusing to collect in-depth data or link it to your personal identity. There have been a number of pieces of evidence released recently that show that they actually collect as much if not more data about you then Google does, and tend to ignore your privacy settings.

The amount of effort required to root a phone hard enough to where apps couldn't stalk me wasn't helping.

Depending on your phone, you could use GrapheneOS (which is super easy to set up compared to rooting and basically the best security and privacy you can get in any smartphone) or CalyxOS. Both easier (and more effective) than rooting, and certainly better than Apple.

Agreed, that'd be nova

It's really cool! Both InfiniTime and WASP OS are very easy to modify as well!

WaspOS:

https://wasp-os.readthedocs.io/en/latest/appguide.html

Flashing guide here: https://wasp-os.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html#pine64-pinetime

InfiniTime:

https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime/blob/main/doc/code/Apps.md

Yeah they confuse criticizing China with racism against Chinese people. Additionally they claim that any source from and news agency or journalists in the US that says anything bad about the USSR or China is CIA propaganda and should be ignored but then exclusively site Chinese propaganda websites.

There's also a lot of other evidence: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

im just shooting that down outright, what about the devs or the server they run matters?

It matterd because the servers those devs run with their heavy pro authoritarian red fascist moderation and cultural bias were the two largest instances, the flagships, both by virtue of their size and their official nature. That size means they influence users' overall experience of the lemmy network's culture and atmosphere via posts and comments and votes, so yeah, you can sign up for a different instance and that local community won't have that atmosphere and those moderation problems but you're still connected in the network to the tankies and the tankies have the largest and most dominant instances so they have the most effect on the content of the network, and you can't completely avoid them except by deferating and basically hamstringing yourself by separating from the two largest instances.

Thanks to Beehaw and especially lemmy.world though, I think this is rapidly changing and won't be a significant problem for much longer, although there is the remaining concern that the developers' biases will show through in how they develop the underlying lemmy server software. For instance, unlike Mastodon, right now there is no way for you as an individual to block an entire instance, and I foresee it possibly being difficult to convince the lemmy developers to allow that, since one of the hallmarks of Marxist-Leninist ideology is a focus on mass movement building where everyone is forced to interact and join this one giant movement, even with people they don't like or can't get a long with, which could make them hostile to allowing more freedom of association in the fediverse. I'm already seeing tankies from lemmygrad accusing instances that defederate from them of sectarianism and endangering the "movement", in fact.

Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.

Thank you for writing this. I was almost roped into writing an at-length response to the "reasonable" comment, because it's all canned "Gender Critical" arguments I've seen and debunked a thousand times before, but it would've been an incredible amount of effort that would've been wasted because they'd just respond to me with an even longer and more specious comment, or ignore me.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think what all of us who care about these alternative underground social networks need to do is try to provide the best content we can, because that will attract other people here, which will benefit us in turn through the content they make!