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Comment by porkbird | Hacker News Reader

Apple's iCloud. It's free (up to 5GBs), no ads, and Apple is not in the ads business, hence, they have no use of your personal data (as opposed to Google). I have no idea how good are they in actually protecting your personal data, but I don't recall significant breaches of mobile.me/icloud in the past year.

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> Apple is not in the ads business

Really? http://advertising.apple.com/

Yes, sorry, they are. They are not serving web ads though, nor we have a reliable account that they collect information from user's iCloud emails to enhance the relevancy of iAd ads.

I was about to suggest iCloud, but it does not support some features that may be of interest to HN type users: in particular, "email personalities" - the ability to send outgoing email through the iCloud SMTP server using any of your various non-me.com email addresses.

and Apple is not in the ads business, hence, they have no use of your personal data (as opposed to Google).

Aside from the fact that Apple is in the ad business (to limited success and motive thus far, though if the hardware sales profit train slowed down you can guarantee they would grow more interest), even if they weren't they still are incredibly interested in data about their customers. All businesses are interested in slicing and dicing and categorizing and maximizing sell through, etc.

Sorry, I was inaccurate, they do serve ads, but not web ads, and so far I don't have any reliable information stating that Apple scarps the contents of user's personal data to deliver more relevant ads in a way google does.

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