We saw in Apple’s latest media event a lot of focus on privacy. They run machine learning inferences locally so they can avoid uploading photos to the cloud (though Photo Stream means they’ll get there sooner or later anyway). My Twitter stream frequently features adverts from Apple, saying “we don’t sell your data”.
Of course, none of the companies that Apple are having a dig at “sell your data”, either. That’s an old-world way of understanding advertising, when unscrupulous magazine publishers may have sold their mailing lists to bulk mail senders.
These days, it’s more like the postal service says “we know which people we deliver National Geographic to, so give us your bulk mail and we’ll make sure it gets to the best people”. Only in addition to National Geographic, they’re looking at kids’ comics, past due demands, royalty cheques, postcards from holiday destinations, and of course photos back from the developers.
To truly break the surveillance capitalism economy and give me control of my data, Apple can’t merely give me a private phone. But that is all they can do, hence the focus.
Going back to the analogy of postal advertising, Apple offer a secure PO Box service where nobody knows what mail I’ve got. But the surveillance-industrial complex still knows what mail they deliver to that box, and what mail gets picked up from there. To go full thermonuclear war, as promised, we would need to get applications (including web apps) onto privacy-supporting backend platforms.
But Apple stopped selling Xserve, Mac Mini Server, and Mac Pro Server years ago. Mojave Server no longer contains: well, frankly, it no longer contains the server bits. And because they don’t have a server solution, they can’t tell you how to do your server solution. They can’t say “don’t use Google cloud, it means you’re giving your customers’ data to the surveillance-industrial complex”, because that’s anticompetitive.
At the Labrary, I run my own Nextcloud for file sharing, contacts, calendars, tasks etc. I host code on my own gitlab. I run my own mail service. That’s all work that other companies wouldn’t take on, expertise that’s not core to my business. But it does mean I know where all company-related data is, and that it’s not being shared with the surveillance-industrial complex. Not by me, anyway.
There’s more to Apple’s thermonuclear war on the surveillance-industrial complex than selling privacy-supporting edge devices. That small part of the overall problem supports a trillion-dollar company.
It seems like there’s a lot that could be interesting in the gap.
