Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights - it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
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After all, this is the company that faced down the FBI when the US government tried to force it to weaken its encryption:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-leadership-didnt-say
And it’s true, they did! They also added anti-tracking features that shut down Facebook’s ability to spy on iOS users, a move that Facebook claims cost it $10b in the first year alone (you love to see it):
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/
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But Apple’s commitment to your privacy and security is always contingent, and when its own profits are on the line, the company will swiftly stuff you and your safety out the airlock. Apple refused to weaken its security for the FBI, but when China threatened its access to cheap manufacturing and hundreds of millions of customers, Apple eviscerated its products:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped
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Apple blocked Facebook from spying on you, but when it wanted to build its own surveillance advertising empire, it switched iOS spying back on, gathering exactly the same data as Facebook had, but for its own sole use, and then lied about it:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
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Then there’s #iMessage, Apple’s default messaging tool - “default” in the sense that there’s no way to use other apps without taking additional steps. IMessage has #EndToEndEncryption - but only when you’re communicating with other Apple customers. The instant an Android user is added to a chat or group chat, the entire conversation flips to SMS, an insecure, trivially hacked privacy nightmare that debuted 38 years ago - the year Wayne’s World had its first cinematic run.
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About 41% of American mobile phone users have an Android phone, which means that any time an Apple customer tries to have a conversation with a colleague, a merchant, a loved one, a friend or a family member, there’s a 4 in 10 chance it’s going out “in the clear,” with zero privacy protections.
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This is *not* good for Apple customers. It exposes them to continuous, serious privacy risks. Our mobile devices are keepers of our most intimate secrets, and when mobile security fails, the consequences are grave, as Apple discovered in the hardest way possible, ten years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
Apple’s answer to this is grimly hilarious. The company’s position is that if you want to have real security in your communications, you should buy your friends iPhones.
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Presumably, if those friends - or merchants, or colleagues - don’t want to change operating systems and throw away their device and all their apps, you should just stop talking to them:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tim-cook-says-buy-mom-210347694.html
One of the clinical signs that someone is in a cult is that they are encouraged to isolate themselves from people who aren’t also in that cult:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_to_facilitate_abuse#In_cults
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But there are billions of Apple customers and only a small (but vocal and obnoxious!) minority of those customers are actual cult members, which means that there are billions of people who’d prefer to have private, secure communications with everyone in their lives, not just their fellow Apple customers.
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That’s where #BeeperMini comes in: it’s a third-party Android version of iMessage that builds on the work of a teenager who reverse-engineered iMessage and found a way to let Android users receive secure messages sent by Apple customers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor
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