Only the naive and the ignorant believe that Apple cares about users privacy. All their "privacy" features are just designed to collect more and more data about its users. Even unnecessary data. And they get away with it because of marketing that leads people like you to believe that they can be "trusted" with your data - the same data they use, and will use, to make more money. They have already restarted their advertising network again, like before. They claim they are no longer part of PRISM, a US government program that allowed big tech to sell user data to government agencies.
>“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it.
The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
>An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.
"The iPhone continues to store location data even when location services are disabled, contrary to Apple’s previous claims. The Wall Street Journal did independent testing on an iPhone and found that even after turning off location services, the device was still collecting information on nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points."
"The best way to keep something secret is not to capture and store it in the first place. And that’s the crux of the privacy versus convenience debate now redefining our applications and software-based services ... Yes, maybe what happens on an iPhone stays on an iPhone, but some data should not be captured in the first place. Nothing more so than the significant invasiveness of Apple’s significant locations concept—a perfect illustration of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. This is a continually building data repository of the locations you visit, along with times and dates, detailed maps, even the mode of transport to get you there and how long it took."
“Both iOS and Google Android transmit telemetry, despite the user explicitly opting out of this,” wrote researcher Douglas Leith from Trinity College in Ireland, in a recently published academic report ... “To date, Apple have responded only with silence (we sent three emails to Apple’s director of user privacy, who declined even to acknowledge receipt of an email,” Leith wrote. Since then, Apple has made public statements critical of Leith’s research and insisting privacy and opt-out measures do exist.
"And there’s also a more fundamental issue with this technology. Its euphemistic description as a “crowdsourced” way to recover lost items belies the reality of how these items are tracked. What you won’t find highlighted in the polished marketing statements is the fact that AirTags can only work by tapping into an Apple-operated surveillance network in which millions of us are unwitting participants."
As for "anonymising" user data, Apple has enough data points on its users from various services and sources it collects its user data from to make it meaningless.
They implemented end to end encryption in iMessage to collect more data? There's a vast array of technical instances where apple has gone above and beyond to implement privacy preserving technology, even when they weren't talking about it. This is, like the OP, hysteria without any basis in fact.
Well, kind of. Apparently Messages in iCloud is still E2E encrypted, but not if you have full-device iCloud Backup enabled. Though I've often been prompted for my previous passcode to restore data from an iCloud backup, so not sure if anything has changed on that front.
Apple is a capitalistic company, they are not saints. But part of their business model selling hardware and software is partly based on at least maintaining a minimal level of decency, far above what Google and Facebook practice.
I don't agree with that view point. As both a user of Apple's products and as a worried citizen about privacy rights, to me it looks like Apple is just using a different approach to collect the same user data that Google and Facebook desire. It is just using the hindsight of how Google and Facebook went about it, and the negative PR they faced, to refine both its data collection process and PR strategy to convey they are saints. (It's a classic Apple way - they observe their competitors and their product for a while, before refining it and launching their own).
There is a lot of profit in collecting and monetising user's data - Apple's shareholder will not allow them to leave it on the table. Apple knows that as it was part of the PRISM program and earned a lot of money by supplying the US government it's users data. (Apple also dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv... ). And on a different note, in the early years, Google too begin it's spying and data collection by convincing its users that it is a "decent" company.
