Hi Tony > Yet I now realise the big players do not want us to be free and independent > of them because if we are they may loose us, so I am not supprised they use > security as an excuse to reduce our choice in how we use local storage. I am > sure they wish we all had thin clients designed by them. > > Safari is the browser driven by the most proprietary and closed market > player, Apple. I believe that's why we see this kind of thing in their > products first, it is too generous to believe they are doing it for our good. > Lets hope Firefox can keep it open.
Apple and WebKit are very clear that their motivation is user privacy, and in particular blocking the kind of third party tracking that Facebook and Google use to target advertisements as we move around the web. The problem is that local storage has been abused by advertisers ever since browsers clamped down on cookies; it’s not possible to stop the bad guys from abusing the feature without also blocking the good guys (otherwise the bad guys would just pretend to be good guys). It sounds bleak at first, but it’s clear that the web has to continue to evolve as if every participant was potentially malicious. The obstacle we face at the moment is that the worlds leading browser is Chrome, a browser explicitly engineered to further business interests of Google, and there’s no chance that it will ever adopt the aggressive privacy protections offered by Apple. (One can get an insight into how much of Chrome is dubious from a privacy perspective by the long list of things that Microsoft takes out or disables for Edge https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/204585/these-are-the-features-microsoft-turned-off-or-replaced-in-chromium-based-edge <https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/204585/these-are-the-features-microsoft-turned-off-or-replaced-in-chromium-based-edge> I understand why people stick to the old idea that Apple is motivated solely by lock-in, but I always recommend their stuff to people who can afford it for the simple reason that their business model is aligned with the interests of their users. They profit by selling the best hardware that they can make, and they have zero motivation to track me or invade my privacy. Apple has an interesting history of taking privacy much more seriously than other vendors. For example, they introduced full disc encryption protected with the passcode with the iPhone 3GS, far ahead of any Android manufacturer. In fact, they engineered a separate secure enclave to make it possible to capture and store photos and videos while the phone was locked and the main disc was encrypted. Another example is that Apple offers peer-to-peer file transfer via something they call AirDrop. Google would do that via the cloud, but Apple added a second wifi antenna to their devices so that when two devices exchange a file the protocol is actually that they use Bluetooth to find each other, and then one of the devices sets up an adhoc wifi network which the other device connects to for the file transfer. Apple doesn’t usually go into those kind of details at product launches, they leave it to their security whitepapers. They are quite interesting and detailed: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/welcome/web <https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/welcome/web> I’ve found that to understand the behaviour and motivations of corporations you need to look at the money flows from their perspective. The danger is getting sucked into easy anthropomorphism. Best wishes Jeremy > > Regards > Tony > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TiddlyWiki" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/9cb14c00-8154-4d0d-82b5-2438676f7eaa%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/547F13D8-1732-416A-BF59-80559D77DC43%40gmail.com.
