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"Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." Apple is taking a direct jab at Amazon, Facebook and Google. M

"Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." Apple is taking a direct jab at Amazon, Facebook and Google. My friend who works at Facebook confirmed they actually buy shopping data from Amazon (and in fact many companies buy your credit card shopping history), and internally Facebook has a tool where you can search someone's name and see their shopping history according to the data collected from Amazon. Of course the tool is monitored and all searches are recorded. My friend only ran the search on himself, but he said it was a little shady that this tool exists.

skierscott 9y ago
I work with data scientists and it’s scary how much they have access to. One first hand story: this person searched a database to find tax records for a specific individual and their income. The records were de-anonymized but there’s enough data there he could figure it out. We should design systems to preserve individual privacy. The person I heard the story from had no business in this persons tax records.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  Can you clarify this term - “de-anonymized”? It reads like the word “anonymised” is what’s meant.
  - floatingatoll 9y ago
    "de-personalized" or "anonymized" would both work as valid interpretations in that paragraph, in case that helps you gain understanding while waiting for a reply.
  - piyush_soni 9y ago
    De-anonymising would be detecting/creating a person's identity from sets of "anonymised" information, I'd assume.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    anonymization is a process supposed to protect privacy by removing directly identifying information from a data set, de-anonymization is the reverse process (identifying someone in a dataset with no directly identifying information), proving that anonymization does not work. For example, let's take phone location records, just look where the phone is every night of the week and where it goes every morning and you have the home and work address of the owner which is more than enough to identify the phone owner in pretty much all cases.
  - skierscott 9y ago
    D’oh. I meant anonyomized (I would edit comment but can’t).
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  It's really nothing new. Relatively-low-level IT staff have been able to access the CEO's emails, mostly unabated, for the past couple of decades now. Very few companies actually have working data protections of any sort, let alone audit trails. I've seen setups where virtually anyone with a computer had access to real, valid personal information, including birthdays, employment history, and raw SSNs, of hundreds of thousands of people. This is 100% the norm. In the digital age, privacy is not really a thing, and for the most part, anyone semi-integrated in modern society should just expect that virtually all information about themselves, including things like shopping and television watching habits, conversational "metadata" that is not-quite-so-meta, and so forth is quietly being trafficked by all kinds of parties. Only a tiny portion of that traffic is actual identity theft, though each step along the way increases its likelihood. Do not make the mistake of believing this is exclusively limited to online activity either. Wikileaks has revealed that the government would remotely hijack a common brand of wall-mounted televisions and activate the internal microphone (???) to listen to private conversations, and this has long been a speculated use of cellular phones. Many people willingly stream everything that happens in their home, video and audio, to Google via the NestCam or similar devices. If you've carried your cell phone on you, BigBroCo knows that you were (or weren't) at church on Sunday, Walmart on Tuesday, and that you spent a suspiciously long time parked in the far corner of a parking lot yesterday. It's pretty likely that the relevant parties have already deduced which transaction in Walmart's payment systems was yours and have indexed the contents of your shopping run (even more likely if you've explicitly enabled this by using something like Walmart Pay in the Walmart app). Transactions are tied to your profile and it's all shopped around not only through AdWords but private B2B databases that want the information to try to target you with relevant solicitations. This is trivially visible in a variety of ways, since almost everyone is using such programs in some way or another. It's naive to assume that such gold mines have never tempted anyone, especially when many of the people with an interest in accessing some of that data would also know how to bypass any auditing systems that may exist, and especially when there are many people who'd be happy to grease a few palms for the inside scoop. We're coming in on the world where interest in the vast trove of personal data expands beyond targeted marketing and ultra-high-level political malfeasance. We have a thorny and potentially very scary road ahead of us.
- DataWorker 9y ago
  He probably meant to say deidentified.
justinator 9y ago
This is probably common knowledge: If I browse an item on say, backcountry.com, I'll find ads immediately for that same item on facebook. I leave reviews, sometimes negative ones for items I've already bought on backcountry, so it's kind of strange to then try to get sold the item, again. This is done by cross site cookies, though, right? Buying credit card shopping history (or something very similar) was highlighted in a Malcolm Gladwell book, but I forget which. If I search for, "Malcolm Gladwell" and, "Target" I just get SEO pages as search results, trying to sell me his books. Oh what a world!
rimliu 9y ago
I've recently got into FPV quads hobby. After some shopping at banggood.com and some Youtube videos I see ads for flight controllers and other FPV stuf everywhere, including FB.
Brotkrumen 9y ago
>"Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." Facebook and Google can say the same without lying. Apple's iAd is the ad-network and Apple sells the categorization (male, 14-21, likes dogs) of you based on your personal information. As do G and F. So it's basically PR double speak.
- jeffhuys 9y ago
  I've never actually seen an iAd. Maybe it's US-only?
- laktak 9y ago
  "The iAd App Network was discontinued as of June 30, 2016" (wikipedia)
  - croon 9y ago
    Is this meant to refute the argument, or suggest that it's no longer relevant? If the argument is sound, the question instead becomes: Did their privacy focus start at that date, or did the iAd business case evolve into something else? That iAd was discontinued is the wrong focus. I want to know whether they actually care about privacy, since there is so little insight.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  This PR turn of phrase is really obvious for anyone with some skill in reading this kind of document. The whole document reads like novlang and PR marketing propaganda.
numericboy 9y ago
Apple certainly collect all the data they want. They dont sell it, BUT they now owned your personnal data and they can change their policy any time and be able to sell it if necessary.
bigbugbag 9y ago
To me this sentence reads as "Apple gathers your personal information to take advantage of internally and give at no cost or trade to third parties."

skierscott 9y ago

I work with data scientists and it’s scary how much they have access to. One first hand story: this person searched a database to find tax records for a specific individual and their income. The records were de-anonymized but there’s enough data there he could figure it out. We should design systems to preserve individual privacy. The person I heard the story from had no business in this persons tax records.

lostlogin 9y ago
Can you clarify this term - “de-anonymized”? It reads like the word “anonymised” is what’s meant.
- floatingatoll 9y ago
  "de-personalized" or "anonymized" would both work as valid interpretations in that paragraph, in case that helps you gain understanding while waiting for a reply.
- piyush_soni 9y ago
  De-anonymising would be detecting/creating a person's identity from sets of "anonymised" information, I'd assume.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  anonymization is a process supposed to protect privacy by removing directly identifying information from a data set, de-anonymization is the reverse process (identifying someone in a dataset with no directly identifying information), proving that anonymization does not work. For example, let's take phone location records, just look where the phone is every night of the week and where it goes every morning and you have the home and work address of the owner which is more than enough to identify the phone owner in pretty much all cases.
- skierscott 9y ago
  D’oh. I meant anonyomized (I would edit comment but can’t).
cookiecaper 9y ago
It's really nothing new. Relatively-low-level IT staff have been able to access the CEO's emails, mostly unabated, for the past couple of decades now. Very few companies actually have working data protections of any sort, let alone audit trails. I've seen setups where virtually anyone with a computer had access to real, valid personal information, including birthdays, employment history, and raw SSNs, of hundreds of thousands of people. This is 100% the norm. In the digital age, privacy is not really a thing, and for the most part, anyone semi-integrated in modern society should just expect that virtually all information about themselves, including things like shopping and television watching habits, conversational "metadata" that is not-quite-so-meta, and so forth is quietly being trafficked by all kinds of parties. Only a tiny portion of that traffic is actual identity theft, though each step along the way increases its likelihood. Do not make the mistake of believing this is exclusively limited to online activity either. Wikileaks has revealed that the government would remotely hijack a common brand of wall-mounted televisions and activate the internal microphone (???) to listen to private conversations, and this has long been a speculated use of cellular phones. Many people willingly stream everything that happens in their home, video and audio, to Google via the NestCam or similar devices. If you've carried your cell phone on you, BigBroCo knows that you were (or weren't) at church on Sunday, Walmart on Tuesday, and that you spent a suspiciously long time parked in the far corner of a parking lot yesterday. It's pretty likely that the relevant parties have already deduced which transaction in Walmart's payment systems was yours and have indexed the contents of your shopping run (even more likely if you've explicitly enabled this by using something like Walmart Pay in the Walmart app). Transactions are tied to your profile and it's all shopped around not only through AdWords but private B2B databases that want the information to try to target you with relevant solicitations. This is trivially visible in a variety of ways, since almost everyone is using such programs in some way or another. It's naive to assume that such gold mines have never tempted anyone, especially when many of the people with an interest in accessing some of that data would also know how to bypass any auditing systems that may exist, and especially when there are many people who'd be happy to grease a few palms for the inside scoop. We're coming in on the world where interest in the vast trove of personal data expands beyond targeted marketing and ultra-high-level political malfeasance. We have a thorny and potentially very scary road ahead of us.
DataWorker 9y ago
He probably meant to say deidentified.

justinator 9y ago

This is probably common knowledge: If I browse an item on say, backcountry.com, I'll find ads immediately for that same item on facebook. I leave reviews, sometimes negative ones for items I've already bought on backcountry, so it's kind of strange to then try to get sold the item, again. This is done by cross site cookies, though, right? Buying credit card shopping history (or something very similar) was highlighted in a Malcolm Gladwell book, but I forget which. If I search for, "Malcolm Gladwell" and, "Target" I just get SEO pages as search results, trying to sell me his books. Oh what a world!

rimliu 9y ago

I've recently got into FPV quads hobby. After some shopping at banggood.com and some Youtube videos I see ads for flight controllers and other FPV stuf everywhere, including FB.

Brotkrumen 9y ago

>"Apple doesn’t gather your personal information to sell to advertisers or other organizations." Facebook and Google can say the same without lying. Apple's iAd is the ad-network and Apple sells the categorization (male, 14-21, likes dogs) of you based on your personal information. As do G and F. So it's basically PR double speak.

jeffhuys 9y ago
I've never actually seen an iAd. Maybe it's US-only?
laktak 9y ago
"The iAd App Network was discontinued as of June 30, 2016" (wikipedia)
- croon 9y ago
  Is this meant to refute the argument, or suggest that it's no longer relevant? If the argument is sound, the question instead becomes: Did their privacy focus start at that date, or did the iAd business case evolve into something else? That iAd was discontinued is the wrong focus. I want to know whether they actually care about privacy, since there is so little insight.
bigbugbag 9y ago
This PR turn of phrase is really obvious for anyone with some skill in reading this kind of document. The whole document reads like novlang and PR marketing propaganda.

numericboy 9y ago

Apple certainly collect all the data they want. They dont sell it, BUT they now owned your personnal data and they can change their policy any time and be able to sell it if necessary.

bigbugbag 9y ago

To me this sentence reads as "Apple gathers your personal information to take advantage of internally and give at no cost or trade to third parties."