Unless there's evidence that Apple has sustained a security breach as a result of this posture, it seems to me that they actually are caring about the user. The only incidents that I'm aware of with regard to Apple are social engineering and brute-forcing due to weak user passwords. Is there a situation or evidence that Apple is lying here?
1. "We care about your privacy"
2. Introduce a bunch of privacy tracking controls to restrict what other parties and apps can retrieve and use vis-a-vis data and you.
3. Heavily increase your investment in your own ad network that is not subject to the same restrictions.
My understanding was that Apple asks for user consent before letting ad networks track users across many apps run by different companies. Apple doesn’t do that themselves as far as I know?
2. The privacy tracking controls only restrict tracking across apps and websites. Individual apps are allowed to collect data and it would be impossible for Apple to guarantee that an app couldn't collect data since they clearly can't be aware of every since implementation within the app. Notice what the terms for end-users explicitly state since a company like Meta can't get info from Apple about users across FB and Insta, for example, but may have ways to tie users together based on data they're collecting on the platform itself. Apple can't really stop that. They can only make it more difficult (which they have, as evidence by FB's reaction to the new privacy controls).
3. Where do you get the idea that they're not subject to the same restrictions? I don't see any evidence that this is the case.
It declares:
Data Linked to You The following data, which may be collected and linked to your identity, may be used for the following purposes:
Analytics
Identifiers
User ID
Device ID
Usage Data
Product Interaction
Diagnostics
Performance Data
Other Diagnostic Data
App Functionality
Contact Info
Email Address
Name
Phone Number
User Content
Photos or Videos
Audio Data
Other User Content
Identifiers
User ID
Is that a meaningful distinction? "Oh, yes, we _do_ collect data from you, but have no fear, it's from the OS, not from an app!"
Either way, data is collected.
It may be an Apple problem regardless, but OS settings about data collection do not control app settings about data collection. Should the apps have those data collection settings? Certainly. But now you’re getting into something that Apple would be building that you can guaran-damn-tee that they will force other applications to implement (because it’s good for the user).
I think it's about priorities. The way you can tell when a company cares about something is when you see them give up something else they want to have it. In the case of privacy, they could show that they care by not collecting gobs of telemetry about every time a user plugs in their laptop, every time an executable is run, and exactly what a user looks at in their app store, and for how long. But they do collect all this data because it helps them both with advertising and with "improving" the product (using scare quotes because it's not clear to me what metrics are used to gauge "improvement"). I don't see _any_ effort made to protect Apple's users from Apple itself, and that's the core privacy problem: the mere existence of a massive store of all this data presents a very real risk to users.
> Where do you get the idea that they're not subject to the same restrictions?
The lawsuit alleges that Apple is not subject to the same restrictions it imposes on others. From the article:
> Apple’s iPhones and other devices contain settings that purport to disable all tracking and sharing of app information, but the tech giant continues to collect, track, and monetize their data even after consumers have chosen to disable sharing, it said.
Logically, this suggests that iOS will restrict other apps from tracking behavior across apps/sites, but Apple is leveraging its privileged position as the device and OS manufacturer to remain immune to those exact restrictions.
You're assuming this massive store exists with no evidence for it. One of Apple's central tenets with regard to privacy is that all the telemetry is done on device and never leaves the device except in an anonymized form. Based on what's been shown, this is still accurate. Apple is able to still collect data about how its users behave without any data that's tied to an individual.
>The lawsuit alleges that Apple is not subject to the same restrictions it imposes on others.
That is not evidence that this is true. From the lawsuit itself, they seem to be misunderstanding both how that info is used and how users have consented to it. I don't have enough information to say for certain but, based on the way the article and others are talking about the data and the video that's been presented that shows what data is being sent, there seems to be a misunderstanding between the settings that Apple provides that are meant to prevent cross-application and cross-site data collection with data collection from a single source. Additionally, I think they're making an assumption that the IDs being sent to Apple are shared across applications because I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that that's the case. That means that, unless some evidence is presented that proves it is being shared across apps, Apple is being truthful in what it's saying. It's collecting anonymized data that is then aggregated.
>to remain immune to those exact restrictions.
Again, that's not what has been shown so far. Until it's actually shown, rather than assumed, that Apple is using this tracking information across apps or across sites, Apple is doing what they say they're doing in their privacy policies.
I don't think thats a strong argument. FB's security was never actually breeched during cambridge analyitica. It was information given to a study by paid subjects, plus scraping of their friends graph, plus a fucktonne of PR to say how great their data was. Sure they had information on n million people. But they didn't have _detailed_ information.
With apple, they have unrestricted access to the location of you, your laptop and tags. With that you can work out friendship graphs. Not only that but all the information that every app collects plus a boat load more metadata.
If they cared about the user, they wouldn't be collecting this information, instead they seem to be wanting to muscle into FB and google's advert game.
But, dont get this as me saying meta/google are good. No, they are just as bad as apple, but with varying levels of PR.
I doubt many companies that haven't been hit as hard as Meta have the same sort of systems set up.