I mean Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the big G.

> Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point as a counterpoint to the big G

That’s not true. Apple was position itself as being better at security than Microsoft long before Google was selling devices to people.

For example:

https://youtu.be/VuqZ8AqmLPY

Apple sold itself as having better security.

It's debatable whether or not that was true, and even if you believed it it was up for another debate whether that security was by design or because Apple's vanishingly small share of the PC market made it uneconomical to write malware targeting OSX.

This isn't to say that Microsoft was doing security properly back then either, they weren't.

True, but security and privacy are different things. At most, one could say that security is necessary-but-not-sufficient for privacy.

Google is generally excellent at security, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a nightmare for privacy.

Hmm, might want to reconsider that [1]

[1]https://www.theregister.com/2017/11/28/root_access_bypass_ma....

security isn't privacy, and technology isn't a public policy alignment

I was responding to a comment directly mentioning 'security'

>Apple didn't give two stones about security until it became a marketing/selling point

I don't much care. Companies don't have ethics, they have fiscal goals. If Apples fiscal goals happen to line up with my own goals, so much the better.

I would tend to trust a company who is doing something to selfishly support the bottom line way easier than I would trust a company who claims to be doing it for the common good of all humanity.

Google famously started off trying to not be evil and also be a profitable company simultaneously. It didn't work out great in that one of those goals became slightly more important than the other.

It's called market shift.

Automative manufactures didn't give a rats ass about fuel economy until customers wanted it.

Also multiple celebrities had their nudes stolen from their iCloud.

The ironic thing is that WhatsApp very heavily pushes users into Google account backups, which are unencrypted, giving government agencies all the access they want.

I remember some talk about those getting encrypted, don't k ow if that has happened yet.

it happened in 2021, and some form of encryption for whatsapp icloud backups has apparently been available since 2016

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/whatsapp-encrypted-backups

You can encrypt the Google drive backup actually. It's just a toggle switch on the backup menu setting to enable it.

They seems to be end to end encrypted now. It asked me a password to encrypt the backup with. It's a recent feature and you must trust a closed source app. No idea of I can download the backup from Google drive with a web browser and decrypt it with some common decryption program.

Messenger also has e2e, but it's opt in.