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The thing is, the terms-of-service they give you that you agree to. That thing everyone skips. In it, Apple specifically says they don't track you or sell your

The thing is, the terms-of-service they give you that you agree to. That thing everyone skips. In it, Apple specifically says they don't track you or sell your data (but as you say, that could change). This is why when they do have any breach of that agreement...like when they said that some humans listen to Siri requests to make sure it's being accurate, they were sued for it. People hold their feet to the fire over anything they may flub. And since Apple doubles down on saying they're the best at privacy, more and more people are chomping at the bit to sue them or call them out on it. They have to tread carefully. Google and Microsoft on the other hand blatantly say "yeah, we look over your shoulder at everything you do on the Internet...you know, to "help" you find what you're looking for or to feed more of it to you. And also, our advertisers would be very interested too". I mean, read THEIR TOS and marvel at it.

AnonCoward42 3y ago
Of all of them isn't Google the only one that is actually incentivized to keep the data they get on you to themselves, because of their business model? It sounds bad for Google when they sell their data to others, so they'd feed a competitor for personalized ads. I might be wrong tho. It's obvious, but I want to make clear, that this doesn't make Google less scary or more trustworty. Avoiding Google is still advised imo. edit: replace "private" with "to themselves"
- spogbiper 3y ago
  Right as I understand it at least. Google's business model has never been to sell your data, despite how persistent that idea seems to be. Your data is Google's most valuable resource and they should be extremely motivated to protect it.
- dwaite 3y ago
  Google's primary interest is in building a relationship with you so it understands the kinds of information you want, and can sell people on preferential order of getting information to you. They are primarily an information marketplace, and offer people free services so that they'll participate in that market. Their secondary interest is in things like Adsense and in products like Doubleclick, which are where you worry about tracking and them building a behavioral persona of what you do across the entire internet. However, Google doesn't need to even see this persona themselves - they just want to get the best ads in front of you to make marketing departments happy. Ideas like "privacy sandbox" are partially driven by this desire - give Google the value of gathering and correlating existing data and more, without the brand impact or risks of holding that data themselves. The thing they give up is the ability to do cluster analysis across people/demographics to understand where and why an ad is performing. Targeting of advertisements remains a manual process and not a machine learning driven one.
fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
Can you clarify “don’t track you”? Apple charges its advertisers for ad clicks and reports the conversion rate, so whether you make a purchase after clicking one of their ads is definitely tracked (conversion is the main big money tracking data point that Facebook and Google care about).
- dwaite 3y ago
  Reporting a conversion rate is not the same as reporting that _you_ as a particular user converted. For advertising to remain a viable way to support portions of the web, advertisers need to understand the effectiveness of their programs and marketplaces need to understand the exposure. Specifications like PCM are competing mostly around how to provide that, although there are also efforts to sandbox local personas to make ad presentation decisions on-device. Personally I'm not so much against those efforts, as it doesn't seem like a betrayal for my web browser to try to select information it thinks I'd more likely care about - as long as I can also choose how/if it does so.
  - account42 3y ago
    > For advertising to remain a viable way to support portions of the web I'd rather advertising NOT remain a viable way to support portions of the web
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
The amount of false information in this message is staggering. Apple never said they won't track you. Apple specifically says they collect this data[1]: > Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data. > Health Information. Data relating to the health status of an individual, including data related to one’s physical or mental health or condition. > Financial Information. Details including salary, income, and assets information where collected, and information related to Apple-branded financial offerings Also, Siri hadn't been sued for breaking TOS AFAIK, but they were sued for leaking health records which they couldn't even after getting permission from the user. Also google selling user data is largely a myth. [1]: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
- dwaite 3y ago
  > Apple never said they won't track you. Apple specifically says they collect this data[1]: Indeed. Apple's concerns are about "third-party" tracking, e.g. multiple parties sharing information about you and building a persona without your awareness or consent. They fully _expect_ users to build first-party relationships, such as having Apple understand, save, and perhaps provide insights or fraud detection around the transaction log of your usage of your Apple Card. This is why Google's reaction to App Tracking Transparency was to effectively say "we'll be fine, we have lots of services, and we might push people to log in for features." This is also why Facebook's reaction was to freak out - because they had no legitimate relationships on which to base their web surveillance advertising product on, especially when it was being used to select advertisements for non-Facebook-users. For first party relationships, the App Store has "privacy labels", to document the data you collect, save and share with processors. Behavioral information is around sharing correlating factors that would be used for third-party tracking.

AnonCoward42 3y ago

Of all of them isn't Google the only one that is actually incentivized to keep the data they get on you to themselves, because of their business model? It sounds bad for Google when they sell their data to others, so they'd feed a competitor for personalized ads. I might be wrong tho. It's obvious, but I want to make clear, that this doesn't make Google less scary or more trustworty. Avoiding Google is still advised imo. edit: replace "private" with "to themselves"

spogbiper 3y ago
Right as I understand it at least. Google's business model has never been to sell your data, despite how persistent that idea seems to be. Your data is Google's most valuable resource and they should be extremely motivated to protect it.
dwaite 3y ago
Google's primary interest is in building a relationship with you so it understands the kinds of information you want, and can sell people on preferential order of getting information to you. They are primarily an information marketplace, and offer people free services so that they'll participate in that market. Their secondary interest is in things like Adsense and in products like Doubleclick, which are where you worry about tracking and them building a behavioral persona of what you do across the entire internet. However, Google doesn't need to even see this persona themselves - they just want to get the best ads in front of you to make marketing departments happy. Ideas like "privacy sandbox" are partially driven by this desire - give Google the value of gathering and correlating existing data and more, without the brand impact or risks of holding that data themselves. The thing they give up is the ability to do cluster analysis across people/demographics to understand where and why an ad is performing. Targeting of advertisements remains a manual process and not a machine learning driven one.

fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago

Can you clarify “don’t track you”? Apple charges its advertisers for ad clicks and reports the conversion rate, so whether you make a purchase after clicking one of their ads is definitely tracked (conversion is the main big money tracking data point that Facebook and Google care about).

dwaite 3y ago
Reporting a conversion rate is not the same as reporting that _you_ as a particular user converted. For advertising to remain a viable way to support portions of the web, advertisers need to understand the effectiveness of their programs and marketplaces need to understand the exposure. Specifications like PCM are competing mostly around how to provide that, although there are also efforts to sandbox local personas to make ad presentation decisions on-device. Personally I'm not so much against those efforts, as it doesn't seem like a betrayal for my web browser to try to select information it thinks I'd more likely care about - as long as I can also choose how/if it does so.
- account42 3y ago
  > For advertising to remain a viable way to support portions of the web I'd rather advertising NOT remain a viable way to support portions of the web

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

The amount of false information in this message is staggering. Apple never said they won't track you. Apple specifically says they collect this data[1]: > Usage Data. Data about your activity on and use of our offerings, such as app launches within our services, including browsing history; search history; product interaction; crash data, performance and other diagnostic data; and other usage data. > Health Information. Data relating to the health status of an individual, including data related to one’s physical or mental health or condition. > Financial Information. Details including salary, income, and assets information where collected, and information related to Apple-branded financial offerings Also, Siri hadn't been sued for breaking TOS AFAIK, but they were sued for leaking health records which they couldn't even after getting permission from the user. Also google selling user data is largely a myth. [1]: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

dwaite 3y ago
> Apple never said they won't track you. Apple specifically says they collect this data[1]: Indeed. Apple's concerns are about "third-party" tracking, e.g. multiple parties sharing information about you and building a persona without your awareness or consent. They fully _expect_ users to build first-party relationships, such as having Apple understand, save, and perhaps provide insights or fraud detection around the transaction log of your usage of your Apple Card. This is why Google's reaction to App Tracking Transparency was to effectively say "we'll be fine, we have lots of services, and we might push people to log in for features." This is also why Facebook's reaction was to freak out - because they had no legitimate relationships on which to base their web surveillance advertising product on, especially when it was being used to select advertisements for non-Facebook-users. For first party relationships, the App Store has "privacy labels", to document the data you collect, save and share with processors. Behavioral information is around sharing correlating factors that would be used for third-party tracking.