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This is a really dumb move. It's not like Apple was previously unaware of this, there were entire venture backed companies built entirely around being able to d
by skarz 8y ago
This is a really dumb move. It's not like Apple was previously unaware of this, there were entire venture backed companies built entirely around being able to do this and they've been around for years.
Despite seeming scary, this is actually the most benign form of data collection. People have this naive notion that companies have this obsessive desire to track them as an individual. Working at tech companies, this could not be further from the truth. I do not give a shit about you as an individual, I care about you as a collection of attributes that I can correlate with the attributes of the rest of the user base. The only time I care about you as an individual is if you're reaching out to our customer service as an individual with a problem and I want to help diagnose it.
The problem with screen recording data is remarkably useless for anything else because it's too high fidelity to be aggregated. If I want to serve you more personalized ads or manipulate you into purchasing something, there are other tools that are far more appropriate for the purpose.
The only reason Apple is doing this is for PR reasons, to help signal to everyone that they're a privacy conscious business. But they're doing this by leveraging people's misunderstanding of how data collection is done and banking on emotional fears rather than actual damage.