It would be amazingly risky for Apple to hide backdoors in their products. One of their big selling points is their reputation for taking user data privacy seriously. If it ever came out that they’d helped a government by violating that, their credibility would be shot and they’d lose a noticeable percentage of customers overnight.
That’s not good business, so I don’t think they’d risk it.
I’ve not read anything suggesting they are. I’d imagine this would be quite a big story if anyone has any evidence of it, and the Trump regime is incapable of keeping its mouth shut.
Plus someone from Apple would leak it. Even if you genuinely believe Tim Apple is sucking trump’s dick, you can’t believe the entire company supports that.
I knew someone would say that.
What are my other options?
I’ve gotten away from Microsoft and Android.
I need a phone that can run modern banking apps, so I can’t run some janky Linux OS just for hyper privacy.
I also need something my parents can use, since they’re all in on Apple at the moment too. I don’t live close enough to regularly visit to do on site tech support, and honestly, not my idea of fun anyway.
For better or worse, Apple is it at the moment.
I’m not saying that appeasement is always the way, but I’d rather Apple stayed off Trump’s vindictive side by giving him a little shiny toy then by giving them (for example) user data or backdoors into their platform.
Yes, in an ideal world, they’d tell the whole administration to go fuck itself, but they also don’t want to be destroyed by the government (however illegal that may be, do you really think they’d survive long enough for all the legal challenges to go through the system if Trump decided Apple had to go?)
Well I don’t want stock android, do I? I can hope Apple aren’t selling my personal data. I know that Google would. I’ve de-googled my life, I’m not going back.