> While it may look like Apple is abdicating its responsibility to protect its users
After reading the whole thing it still looks like that. After doing all that work to identify who’s been targeted with mercenary spyware why would you want to go to someone else to have them try their best at finding who it was?
Agree the article doesn’t answer the question at all.
My guess is expertise and scale; if Apple finds five such users a day, that doesn’t support a staff of 100 forensic experts. But if Apple, Facebook, Google, etc, etc, find 500 users a day, that might.
According to this[1] it looks like Apple is more or less directly funding the helpline, so it's more like Apple is outsourcing the work.
Note that I don't think the 2024 table is complete yet. Compared to 2023 there's hardly anything on it. In 2023 you can see that Meta was specifically funding the helpline. Lots of other major tech companies show up too.
Though mostly the charity seems to run on European taxpayer money (~60% of its funding).
Looks like Apple has been funding them for at least the past 3 years so this may even be fair.
If you're really targeted, "they" will also go for your non Apple devices like your "smart" TV. So you could probably use support to harden all your tech stuff.
Apple’s game is deep vertical integration. That’s all fine and dandy for selling products, but helps not one bit for customers who aren’t all-in on Apple’s ecosystem. A third party who only does this sort of work, in a platform agnostic way, is the sane way to handle things.
Right. If there is training or some other non-Apple/vendor agnostic stuff that has to go on (VPN) or device management they probably don’t want to get involved.
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. Apple has obviously gone to significant effort to detect and notify in these situations, and they actually provide helpful information - pointing victims to an organization which can actually help them. Abdicating responsibility would be to do none of these.
>After doing all that work to identify who’s been targeted with mercenary spyware why would you want to go to someone else to have them try their best at finding who it was?
Thus is a great question and Apple's actions here seem to undermine many of the privacy arguments they've made against Right To Repair.
After reading the whole thing it still looks like that. After doing all that work to identify who’s been targeted with mercenary spyware why would you want to go to someone else to have them try their best at finding who it was?