Hacker News Reader

Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

Thats a good thing. Can Apple guarantee that they themselves are not tracking their users' app preferences/behaviour either?

View on HN

There's a fairly simple cui bono aspect to this.

Apple makes money by selling products to their users or taking a cut of the users' purchases in their marketplace.

Facebook and Google, on the other hand, make most of their money by selling micro-segmented access to their user base to third parties.

Which of these two kinds of companies stands to benefit from harvesting more data about their users whenever possible?

Apple profits from knowing their users' app/music/news/books/siri etc preferences and making purchase suggestions, don't they?

Sort of.

Apple's recommendations are handled on-device. It's great for security, but the downside is that Apple News on my iPhone and Apple News on my computer don't have the same list of publications I dislike.

That's genius! Apple avoided developing synchronization of user data and got good PR for doing that.

I'm gonna try that with my clients. "Sir, I wont aggregate your store's point of sale data because it's more secure if the data never leaves the store. Now pay me a premium for the added security, thanks."

Try it, it might do some good.

That's not quite the same as selling that information to political 'think tanks' to buy influence in an election.

That's kind of besides the point. Could this info be e.g. passed to US authorities if requested? Is it being used for nefarious purposes? We don't know.

At least in EU (and thus all apps made in EU) you can ask for personal info to be deleted. The list of apps downloaded is certainly sensitive info that reveals many preferences. Can you ask apple to delete this info?

Under the GDPR it is permitted to keep PII, resposibly, if that PII is used for conducting normal business, which should ideally be anonymised. Arguably, apps that you have downloaded from an online store fall under this category. You can close an AppleID, thereby deleting donload info, but you'll lose access to the apps that you have purchased, including IAPs. There is absolutely a discussion to be had around that, but that's moot with regard your point. Asking Apple to delete the info about app purchase history is self defeating. A better question to aim at Apple is to ask if the data is anonymised. The same is true of Google Play.

See https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

> You can close an AppleID, thereby deleting donload info

That's not what GDPR requires. I am sure Apple has a way to request to delete sensitive info such as app purchases without loss of service, or else they d be in violation in EU.

> to aim at Apple is to ask if the data is anonymised.

I can't see a way in which my app purchases could be anonymized (then it wouldn't be personal information)

Let's form the issue here using an example from the regulation:

A bank holds personal data about its customers. This includes details of each customer’s address, date of birth and mother’s maiden name. The bank uses this information as part of its security procedures. It is appropriate for the bank to retain this data for as long as the customer has an account with the bank. Even after the account has been closed, the bank may need to continue holding some of this information for legal or operational reasons for a further set time.

Based on that, I'd suggest its entirely reqasonable to posit:

An online app store holds personal data about it's customers. This includes payment information and a list of apps that have been purchased, including free apps, and which of those apps have been downloaded. It is appropriate for the app store to maintain this information so they can allow the customer to install apps on their devices and link in app purchased made in those apps to the correct account. Even after the app has been removed from a device, the app store may need to continue holding some of this information for legal and/or operation reasons.

Arguing that app store purchases are sensitive is some what missing the wood for the trees. What matters is what is done with the information. If Apple (or Google, Sony and Microsoft - they all run similar stores) use this in an attempt to target app store recommendations, the negative inpact on the individual is extremely debatable, certainly from the point-of-view of GDPR. If they are using the information to build a profile of an individual to sell access to that individual to 3rd parties, then there is a problem.

Who sold user data to a third party?

Facebook and Google are valuable because they have this data and their customers don't. If the data is harder to come by, Facebook and Google just win out over smaller data collectors.

Of course they can’t guarantee it. The best they could do is give users the ability to block all internet access in an app. Currently you can only block an app from using cellular data.

Interestingly in China you can block all network access…

There is an option in settings on iOS to block all network access per app?

Yeah, on Chinese phones. I believe Wi-Fi is renamed “WLAN” but there is a setting to control what connections an app can make.

It is just a China thing. I learned something new today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/aib10i/in_china_ios_al...

Nope they can't. In fact to use an iOS device you pretty much need an Apple account (if you want to be able to install any apps) and that comes with a privacy policy and some extra "features" you might not know about like every sender e-mail on iOS Mail being synced to their cloud.

However, at least we can find comfort in the fact that their business model so far has been against the surveillance/advertising economy and their entire marketing strategy has been based on that for the past few years, so at least they currently do not have any incentive to misuse that data even if they do collect it (and if they do eventually think about misusing it, we can hope that there would be some actual enforcement of laws such as the GDPR that would discourage them from doing so).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com