It may seem silly

John Gruber wrote about the Jon Evans piece, “Don’t be Apple”.

Jon Evans argued that since Apple has a centralised ecosystem, there is a chance that Apple can turn it into a surveillance system for the government. Hence, we shouldn’t be using Apple products. Can you work out the logic in that?

At which point we’d be forced to continue using these spyware Apple products because… ? And engineers at Apple would continue working for the company rather than resigning en masse because… ? And Apple would suffer no bad publicity for its cowardice because… ? Because: Tim Cook could surely flip a switch that would enable this surveillance without anyone noticing.

This advice is madness. Evans is recommending against using a platform that is secure and private today, from a company with a consistent decades-long track record in this regard, because in the future they might turn coat and become an accomplice of government mass surveillance, even though, if that came to pass, we could and would all just abandon the use of Apple products.

This is just ridiculous fear-mongering using a hypothetical situation. As Gruber puts it, even if it does come to that, we have the choice of ditching Apple. Why stay away from a secure platform that champions privacy just because of what might, as remotely as it can be, happen?

But wait, that’s not all.

Jon Evans:

But I have a sneaking suspicion that over the next year this dispute will grow more and more concrete. Maybe, as this contrast heightens, Apple will see the light; maybe instead of fighting jailbreakers, they will offer jailbreaking and sideloading as an option for power users out of the box, just as Android does. That alone would be a huge seismic shift.

So he wants a secure ecosystem to be made with a possible exploit so that users will feel more secure. I’ll give you some time to wrap your head around that.