How does good privacy engineering at the platform level have any effect on lock-in?
It is abundantly clear that Apple loves locking people in, and also clear that they love taunting their advantages over their competitors. But I just don’t see how the better engineered platform protections for privacy have anything to do with the lock-in (no network effects, no switching costs)
My favorite example of this is the Find My network: did they totally screw Tile in their own competitive interests? Absolutely. Does their end-to end-encrypted Find My network have state of the art cryptographic design to minimize data collection? Absolutely.
Privacy also has concrete value for Apple. Apple made a fair argument that the Health app is HIPAA compliant because while the backend is nothing special, the syncing is end to end encrypted.
They do make mistakes, and they are a large self-interested corrupt terrible bad corporation, but I am happy that they are pushing the industry forward.
