HACKER Q&A
📣 ir77

What are upset iOS users going to do?


lot of upset people commenting here, but materially what are you planning on changing as an iOS user with the upcoming CP scanning implementation in iOS15? some thoughts of mine since i'm still on a contract and owe $ on my phone:

- possibly stay on ver 14 as long as possible

- i've been using iCloud photos to free up space on my phone, downloading all videos to store on an external HD and will delete them & turn off iCloud photo sync

- ultimately bail to some degoogled android option?

let me know what firm steps you've decided to take if you're not happy with the direction apple is going with.


  👤 runjake Accepted Answer ✓
For iOS? Nothing.

Google is or will be as bad/worse, the third party privacy-oriented Android distros are too much hassle, and dumb phones are too insecure/slow/busted.

For macOS (which will also scan your photos for secret indicators), prior to this announcement, I was already in the process of migrating to a Linux desktop.

This is only Apple's first step on its retreat from its user privacy soapbox. I expect it to get worse and so I reserve the right to change my mind about the above options.


👤 moepstar
That's exactly the question that is in the back of my head the past few days.

Computer / iMac? Uh, well, having used Linux on the desktop (various distros) for years already, this won't be as much of a problem.

Something that gives me pause is how well Mint runs on some brick-ish HP laptop from around 2012, just replaced the HDD with SSD. It just feels way snappier compared to my fully decked out late 2017 iMac 5k with 64GB RAM, 4,2Ghz.

I'll be missing the deep integration between iPhone, Watch - but other than that not much probably.

But the iPhone itself? That is going to be tough.

Been an iPhone user since the 3G, iOS 2.0 (2.01 shortly afterwards) and always liked the devices, the clarity of the OS (though sometimes it fell short regarding having all the bells and whistles, early on i've solved that via Jailbreaking).

So, no - i don't immediately have an answer. Ideally, there would be something akin to the polish of a modern Linux OS on a decently powered phone, in a nice hardware package.

I dread running Android :(


👤 Sevii
I'm just going to get a mini linux box and a PinePhone like device as backups.

We live in a world where due to technology a panopticon is almost inevitable. Using free software is the only real way to take back control.

As this technology expands we might need to move open source work to linux hosts only. We have no idea what will be banned next. I just don't want to end up in a situation where I don't have any hardware/software combination I can trust to serve me and me alone.


👤 privacyisntdead
I’m keeping my 12 on iOS 14 for as long as possible. Keeping an eye on this issue and their potential antitrust case.

Voting with my wallet and canceled my 2TB plan. Will not be buying any of their hardware anymore.


👤 dotcoma
Would it be sufficient if we got an iOS version of Stingle?

https://stingle.org/

Or is it too late and we need to drop the iPhone altogether?

https://calyxos.org/

https://e.foundation/


👤 midnightGhost
- I’m staying on iOS 14 for as long as I can.

- I disabled iCloud and iCloud photos.

- For now doing encrypted backups to iTunes on my pc.

- I’ve also started using Cryptee and they seem solid. Link below. I’m also curious to see how cryptee develops. https://crypt.ee/


👤 Spooky23
They are going to forget about it and move on.

There’s no viable place to go that isn’t performing the same function.


👤 rl1987
It seems that this can be mostly side-stepped by not using iCloud for storing the photos and preferably using something self-hosted instead. If you upload all your photos to e.g. Google there's nothing stopping them from scanning them and possibly using it against you as well.

👤 mattl
If space is an issue, you could use Google Photos instead of iCloud Photos, and your photos will be scanned on Google's servers instead?

👤 rdtwo
I just turned off iCloud. Mine has filled up ages ago anyway and I don’t want anything to do with it

👤 kleer001
I'm going to have left the ecosystem 3 years ago and never look back.

👤 atatatat
GrapheneOS.org