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Apple has astutely observed that they don't need a bunch of tracking cookies to track you across sites and services if they already have your account on your ph

Apple has astutely observed that they don't need a bunch of tracking cookies to track you across sites and services if they already have your account on your phone and access to everything directly. Google has something like this moat within their search engine dominance, likewise Facebook does for social, but both of them are rather limited slices in comparison with the OS itself. So, we arrive at this junction - Apple lobbies, for the consumer of course, to prevent tracking across the web, and conveniently limits their number of competitors to one, that being Microsoft which seems rather inept at this advertising thing anyway. It's hard to root for Google or Facebook here, but it's also pretty obvious that our friends in Cupertino don't have our best interests in mind.

joshgachnang 4y ago
I'd say Google should be in a pretty good spot with Android + search engine.
- alex_young 4y ago
  That’s a good observation, but Google really doesn’t control things the same way Apple does since they aren’t directly distributing Android for the most part. It would be hard to pull off that kind of synchronization with the handset ecosystem.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Google has very direct control over Google Play internal services which are effectively system-level services on android, and collects at least as much data on those users as Apple does on theirs. The 1% of users running some custom Android build aren't really relevant here, Google scrapes up plenty.
    - shagie 4y ago
      > ... [Google] collects at least as much data on those users as Apple does on theirs. https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf > That is, almost two order of magnitude is uploaded by Android (3.6MB) than by iOS at startup, while Android downloads around a third (952MB) of the data of iOS (2.6GB). The paper goes on into a lot more detail of tracking what identifiers are sent when and how often. In particular, look at figure 4 on page 6.

joshgachnang 4y ago

I'd say Google should be in a pretty good spot with Android + search engine.

alex_young 4y ago
That’s a good observation, but Google really doesn’t control things the same way Apple does since they aren’t directly distributing Android for the most part. It would be hard to pull off that kind of synchronization with the handset ecosystem.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Google has very direct control over Google Play internal services which are effectively system-level services on android, and collects at least as much data on those users as Apple does on theirs. The 1% of users running some custom Android build aren't really relevant here, Google scrapes up plenty.
  - shagie 4y ago
    > ... [Google] collects at least as much data on those users as Apple does on theirs. https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf > That is, almost two order of magnitude is uploaded by Android (3.6MB) than by iOS at startup, while Android downloads around a third (952MB) of the data of iOS (2.6GB). The paper goes on into a lot more detail of tracking what identifiers are sent when and how often. In particular, look at figure 4 on page 6.