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This is not supported by polling data. See for example:

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-an...

"Some 81% of the public say that the potential risks they face because of data collection by companies outweigh the benefits, and 66% say the same about government data collection."

Asking people whether they care and making them prove it by subjecting themselves to the slightest inconvenience may result in different conclusions.

Exactly.

I only know two persons in real life (other than me) that care about data privacy and act on that. Of course if you ask most people they will say that yeah they care about privacy, but their actions tell a different story.

Most people simply haven't learned the hygiene yet.

It can be as simple as showing them to open incognito for specific searches or topics, or to install a trusted tracker blocking extension like ublock origin and set it up for them.

Managing app location privileges is a big one too, iOS is really good about nagging for background location permissions and I appreciate that a lot, but a lot of people don't realize if you give Facebook or another app "while using", you can bet money it will use it whenever you open the app.

https://business.financialpost.com/technology/tim-hortons-ap... The Tim Hortons app logged this guy's location 2,700 times in 5 months. He didn't find out until the iOS 13 background location warning.

https://cdn.iphoneincanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ios...

People care, most of them just aren't as literate as the typical HN user so they either don't have a clue what's really happening, or simply throw their hands up in the air.

Ignorance was a stronger argument a few years ago, I think now it's just an optimistic take by privacy advocates.

Vast majority of people today know Google/Facebook is Big Brother and that knowledge doesn't matter to them nearly as much as some hoped.

> Most people simply haven't learned the hygiene yet.

There's an entire class of problems you cannot solve through 'hygiene.' Equifax, for example, collected data on you without your consent, and got in trouble for unintentionally giving it away when they're supposed to be getting money in exchange.

> Most people simply haven't learned the hygiene yet.

This whole pandemic kind of proves that we haven't learned the real-life hygiene, after decades and decades of that being drilled into us, and real-life hygiene having actual life-or-death consequences.

Don't hold your breath about digital hygiene.

But what if you could improve your privacy without any inconvenience at all?

That's essentially Apple's marketing pitch on this subject, and this poll shows that there are a lot of people with whom it will resonate.

and the solution is not to say (or imply) that people have messed-up priorities, it is to figure out how to make the right thing as convenient as possible.

How many of those 81% are willing to delete facebook, messenger and instagram though?

Probably very few if that’s what their friends use, but that doesn’t mean they don’t resent it.

A billion people might use Facebook, but 1.3 billion use iMessage. I think this is a significant risk for services that don’t respect user privacy.

I call bullshit on more people using iMessage than any of facebook related services. In this case, I feel like you've a very North American point of view. Majority people who have a smart phone has one of fb/whatsapp/instagram accounts, while iPhones don't even make up for the majority of market share when it comes to smartphone.

Huh, that's interesting. I'm a Brit with a Chinese wife and spend a lot of time over there as well, so I'd hardly call my views America centric. There are a dozen countries I've spent more time in than the USA. It is possible I have a geographic bias, Facebook is barely a thing in China.

But China is an exception. This link says Whatsapp has 1.5 billion active users!

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/whatsapp-statistics/

That's a bad metric. I find Facebook a privacy disaster (and user hostile and i am less happy when I use it). But am I willing to delete it? No, because if I meet someone I can friend them on FB later, and it's my only means of communication for some people. If a better communications network were available I would switch, but since there isn't, I can't.

There you go, you find it to be a disaster but you still find value in it. It's benefits outweigh the concerns you've. IMO it's actually a metric that shows how many people are actually willing to give it up for the sake of privacy.

How does having these apps on my phone hurt my privacy?

Expressed Preferences vs. Revealed Preferences

>19% of the public uses google and/or facebook services.

I think more non-technical people care than you realize. The problem is that many of them care about the wrong things (misunderstanding what the systems are doing) or don't understand how to regain their privacy. They also largely distrust Apple because "It's just another company and they're all alike".

As an example of misunderstanding: Apple attempts to guess at pairs of phone numbers, email addresses, and names based on the data on the phone using analysis on the phone. So someone emailed a colleague a phone number (From: Bob, Body: "Hey, call me at 555-555-5555"). They get a call from 555-555-5555 and "Bob" comes up in the caller ID. It freaked them out, "I haven't added them to my contacts! Apple is reading my email!". This misunderstanding of what the systems are doing and how they're doing it creates an appearance of something "wrong" happening, even when it's not. The inability to distinguish these things leads to "they're all the same" and other perspectives that cause the non-technical people (especially, but even many technical people) to give up. They care, but they don't know how to overcome it (short of getting a dumb phone or a feature phone and moving off grid).

I think they care, but they don't necessarily equate using Apple over Google as to be being more secure and private (the premise in this thread).

They likely see both as secure enough.

The vast majority of the public do not care, at all, about the type of data tracking that gets HNers so up in arms

That was true maybe five years ago, but the HN meme is no longer true.

I interface with a lot of wetware for my job, and I've seen a shift. People have learned to care about privacy.

Some of the education has come from the mass media. Some of it from the creepiness of seeing a product you viewed on one web site follow you around to all the other web sites you visit. Some of it has come from the privacy alert boxes on Apple devices. Some of it from the thousands of TV commercials for privacy services.

The notion that "nobody cares" is simply not true anymore. If it was, then there wouldn't be a demonstrated market for all of the privacy tools out there.

According to the article, 30 percent of iPhone users have turned off IFDA tracking

> Notably, Facebook has declined to even show app install advertisements to the 30% of U.S. iPhone users that turned off their IDFA of their own accord — and now it is opt-in, instead of opt-out.

That is a massive proportion. Especially when you consider that the IFDA setting is buried three or four screens app in the settings app. 30 percent of users went way out of their way to turn tracking off. That tells me that a lot more users care about their privacy than we might assume

> What Apple has done, though, is frame privacy-consciousness in terms of exclusivity and luxury.

That's an interesting point. Without delving into the rest of your comment, I'd like to expand on that one bit and add that part and parcel with exclusivity and luxury, part of Apple's brand has been simplicity, quality, and joy (or pleasure in use).

Like many luxury brands ; ). Or high-end brands. It's a mix.

And I think that Apple is using it's privacy features to enhance the "quality" and "simple" part of their brand in addition to the other aspects you mentioned.

This is not how the tech hype works though. Chrome was hyped up by tech people who despised IE and desperately wanted an alternative. They sold it enough to the non tech crowd. Similarly the privacy conscious tech crowd will sell it to the rest of the bunch. At the end of the day even if people don’t care about privacy it’s still something they can feel good about and it matters.

“Slightest bit inconvenient” is hyperbole. People are busy; don’t blame users if privacy features are built to be too inconvenient for users to adopt. This is where Apple helps too by making privacy easier, e.g. Apple SSO.

>The vast majority of the public do not care, at all, about the type of data tracking that gets HNers so up in arms.

That's a hell of a claim. What's your source on this?

I agree. The layperson may not know the ins and outs, but most people say they want privacy. Apple doing privacy things, marketing said things, and getting news coverage of said things does eventually filter down to the average person. So while few outside tech may really understand IDFA, all the privacy moves Apples makes in aggregate do make it out to the regular person.

Unfortunately, as you touch on, privacy is yet another thing that only people with money get to have.