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Apple admits to secretly giving governments push notification data
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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This headline is ridiculous; I expect better from Ars Technica. You "admit" to things you shouldn't have done. In this case the government compelled Apple to disclose certain data and simultaneously prohibited Apple from disclosing the disclosure. Thanks to a senator's letter, Apple is now free to disclose something that they previously wanted to disclose, about something they were forced to do in the first place.
Compare to the Reuters headline: "Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator." The emphasis and agency are correctly placed on the bad actors.
Clickbaits need to die
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Ask for 10 click bait titles to any essay. It'll be better than your title.
You won’t believe these top 10 generated clickbait titles!
I was hoping moving to Lemmy would get me away from them but I was wrong.
Lemmy isn't really that different, beside being decentralized and has less restrictions (and downvotes/upvotes don't mean shit here). People are people and news outlets are the same.
We need a bot that puts a better title in the comments, or an automod bot that physically changes the titles to be plain
yeah, it looks like most of the other new agencies are attributing it correctly as the government. IMO it's the damn gag order that's most damning. You will spy on them for us and tell no-one.
To be fair Google was already making this information public via their transparency reports, albeit in aggregate, since 2010 [0].
Apple conveniently played it safe until the coast was clear. Maybe they'd have been allowed to comment on this privacy issue if they published it in aggregate like Google - e.g. not specifically calling out the U.S. Govt? But that wasn't a risk Apple was willing to take for its users.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_report
I actually scrolled straight to the bottom of the article to see if it was flagged as being "republished from another Condé Nast property." Just hoping there was an excuse for Ars.
A letter from a senator doesn't carry much legal force. From my understanding of the article, Apple claims they were prohibited from sharing this information, but a simple letter couldn't overturn something like a legal order or court mandate. The change here doesn't support the claim.
It reads more like Apple chose not to disclose in order to avoid the ire of the DOJ, even though it would have been morally more correct to tell the public sooner.