What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?
My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.)
So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices.
The Android spec sheet added a line:
Encryption: Yes
They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1].
Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.
As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice.
I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time.
Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.
If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
Android Enterprise Security White Paper
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.android.com/e...
Chrome browser security
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/chromebrowsersecur...
Google Cloud security Whitepaper
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google_security_wp...
Communicating About Privacy: Towards People- Centered and Accountable Design
https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Privacy-Tran...
By Epic, I'm assuming you don't mean the public interest research center in Washington, DC seeking to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age.
their white paper about the harms of genai is at though https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/EPIC-Generative-...
I.e.: From what I can tell, Google spends approximately $0 on privacy research such as security technology that only benefits end-users.
You linked to a bunch of security technologies that Google just copy-pasted into their products to compete with Apple and Microsoft, or to meet large customer requirements.
Also note that GCP is one of the few offerings Google has where the "users are the customers" instead of products. Despite this, there's nothing in that whitepaper you linked that impresses me as unique or special about GCP in comparison to AWS or Azure. I never hear anything out of Google that's even vaguely privacy-first, even in such divisions.
Linking to a paper with the word "privacy" in it from Facebook is just hilarious.
With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3].
Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w...
[4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...
Did they also talk about all the vulnerabilities that can constantly root a phone with a message on imessage, without any user interaction?
Yes multiple ones… because they don't bother (or don't want?) to fix them properly.
All vendors have bugs in their products, including security bugs.
Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.
Google does not. The entire company exists to drain your personal data into a giant pond for their ad-tech analysts to splash around in.
Remember when apple had their own JRE implementation (forked from sun's) and they were fixing well known vulnerabilities after months rather than hours like sun was doing?
> Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.
Their privacy protecting effort starts and end inside their marketing department. No engineering employee is involved in that. And judging by your posts, it seems their strategy is working great, and they can also mine your data and for money like everyone else as well, while convincing you otherwise.
Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...
I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor...
Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company.
Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising.
Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year.
So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales.
Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart!
Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine.
(I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant.
How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.
The question that was asked:
> What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?
The response was given:
> Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers
And then I pointed out that despite how Apple would like to publicly portray themselves and how their fans would love to try and convince you otherwise that it is in fact a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar a year business of theirs where they are doing exactly that. The idea that you are not the product is actively wrong.
If a pastry shop also sells sausage rolls, does that make them a butcher shop?
Compare this to Google or Facebook, both of which derive about 80-90% of their revenue from advertising, with all other services and products barely an afterthought.
Money, more than anything, drives corporate priorities, culture, and attitudes.
“Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.” — James W Frick