TIL: Apple's Privacy claims are just marketing fluff and in practice do not provide any privacy improvements. On the contrary, it's dangerous because it creates a false illusion of privacy. https://blog.lockdownprivacy.com/2021/09/22/study-effectiveness-of-apples-app-tracking-transparency.html

I've given up on getting privacy from smartphones a long time ago. Some of the main reasons I think it's impossible to achieve is because I learned following in last few years- Hidden x86 instructions sets that allows any user mode application to get complete access to your system. black hat talk. This led me to believe that any processor can be made in a way which grants access to particular adversary. While the company mentioned in the talk is not something famous and people expect AMD/Intel to not do this sort of shenanigans today, there's still a case of UEFI startup. I recently read a report about microsoft trying to get AMD and Intel to include the firmware directly inside the chip. This will remove the possibility to establish the root of trust. I believe they might have thought that someone motivated enough could remove UEFI chip from mother board and insert say Raspberry PI controlled simulated UEFI environment. These is also the curious case of botched up NIC card where some malware is already installed. Considering that on PCs we still have the option(theoretically?) to remove these components, the core of smartphones is a single SoC chip. It they want to(or compelled to by political forces) they can include such hidden components there to circumvent any privacy solutions used by a end user. A typical response I get when I tell people these things is that "No one is going after you in this way". Which is absurd to me. While I understand political forces not come after a commoner like me, bar for companies to use such components to track my usage of their device is far low. Smartphone market is a duopoly now. Given Android uses all sorts of analytics it seems plausible to me that apple could use similar thing to increase their revenue. Most likely back door deals with other powerful companies. They might use hidden components or they might not. But they most certainly can.