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Comment by moviuro | Hacker News Reader

Apple sells tons of subscription-based services: Music, News, TV, Games, Storage, etc. (+ their slice of App sales). If this keeps up, they don't have an incentive to track their users and sell that data. (They could still track them to find out what's "hot" and what genre(s) they should produce next, like Netflix did)

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But Google sells services too. If Apple is not making most of its money on hardware, then what differentiates Apple's incentives from Google's? Do you think they'll simply decide, "We will not track people for targeting ads, and we won't sell their data"? But what if they find that that perspective doesn't actually help them sell their services, because the vast majority of consumers just don't know or care about these issues like HN users do? It didn't cost them much to have that perspective when most of their income was from hardware, but once it's coming from online services, it may turn out that they're leaving a lot of money on the table, which would be very easily made, by being less purist about the privacy issue. Not that they're super-purist now, from what I've heard...

Apple is pushing the privacy narrative because it's an area in which Google, and hence Android, cannot compete. Google/Android can't compete because the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from ads, which cannot work well with privacy.

Apple is spending lots of money to make privacy become important to the average smartphone user. It's spending that money not just to make itself look good, it's spending it to make Google/Android look bad, and thereby cause more users to switch to iPhone.

But is there evidence that enough consumers care about privacy, so that we can have confidence that this approach will pay off for Apple? Because, if not enough consumers care that their privacy orientation is rewarded from a purely financial point of view, I have little faith that Apple will stick to it purely as a matter of principle. Do you?

It's not a matter of users picking privacy vs no privacy. It's just one point in the package Apple are offering. For some people it's a major point, and for some people it's not. But it's still a point, and it's one nobody can compete in so it's particularly strong. They are just leveraging a competitive advantage, but it's not the only one.

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