While I agree with the rest of your post I want to respond to this particular part of it: >I will happily give Google my location if it helps me avoid traffic

While I agree with the rest of your post I want to respond to this particular part of it: >I will happily give Google my location if it helps me avoid traffic jams, something many HN readers object to. The premise of this statement is that you have to give them this data to avoid traffic jams as part of an inherent bargain, but that's not the case. Yes at a very basic level maps apps need to access GPS to work, but the implementations matter. Apple Maps was specifically designed so that you can have those features in a privacy-preserving manner [1]: >“We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.” >The segments that he is referring to are sliced out of any given person’s navigation session. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones. >Because only random segments of any person’s drive is ever sent and that data is completely anonymized, there is never a way to tell if any trip was ever a single individual. The local system signs the IDs and only it knows to whom that ID refers. Apple is working very hard here to not know anything about its users. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level. Google is obviously trying to reframe the privacy debate into "yes we take your data, but it's necessary to give you valuable services" [2][3][4] (these last two takes seem to have just gone with the Google PR rep's package, given the titles) but that obfuscates that they're collecting way more data in a completely unfettered way outside of a specific purpose in connection with providing a service (something GDPR addresses but will probably need to be litigated). Apple repeatedly insists that providing great features/functionality doesn't have to come at the expense of your privacy. And I believe them for the simple fact that Google hasn't really been able to demonstrate what value they offer that only the Surveillance Capitalism model can provide. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f... [2] https://stratechery.com/2019/google-fights-back/ https://stratechery.com/2019/google-fights-back/ [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/technology/google-privacy-tools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/technology/google-privacy... [4] https://char.gd/recharged/daily/google-finds-religion-in-privacy https://char.gd/recharged/daily/google-finds-religion-in-pri...