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> For example, any person or entity could rent a list with the names and addresses of all unmarried, college-educated women over the age of 70 with a household income of over $80,000 who purchased country music from Apple via its iTunes Store mobile application,” the customers said. “Such a list is available for sale for approximately $136 per thousand customers listed.

Where do you purchase this list from?

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It's an open secret that many of the "anonymized" datasets that the large tech giants pass around are very easy to de-anonymize. I don't know much about how Apple works, but people who work with Google Ad products and analytics regularly violate the anonymity agreement because it's so financially lucrative to do so and just never tell anyone.

We need to stop mining people for profit while putting minimal or zero privacy protections in place.

If that was the case I imagine you could ding Apple on false claims. They pretty prominently claim "Differential Privacy" both in their keynotes and on their website. Their claims are also that data is anonymized before they process it. Other companies have been a lot more vague and hand-wavy about "anonymized" in my experience and you're absolutely right that a lot of anonymized datasets can be de-anonymized by correlation.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/

From Apple?

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