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Apple's core incentives are misaligned with stealing your data. And that's why they are more trustworthy than facebook. It's that simple. Apple is first and fo

by screye 3y ago

Apple's core incentives are misaligned with stealing your data. And that's why they are more trustworthy than facebook. It's that simple. Apple is first and foremost a lifestyle company, then a b2b platform company, then a hardware company. The lifestyle company ensures customer acquisition and the 'unreasonable' pricing . The platform company is the revenue, the moat and the golden handcuffs for every 3rd party company who works with Apple. The Hardware company ensures that Apple stays ahead, so no one can be the next Apple. Apple could be an ads company too. But ads companies bleed trust. That weakens the value of both Apple the lifestyle company and Apple the hardware company. Apple already skims 30% of your app revenue. They don't need to make money from ads, when they can make money from those who make money from ads. Apple being an ads company would spook the partners of Apple the platform company. I trust Apple not because they're good. But because selling your data hurts their bottomline. Trust capitalistic incentives and teack records, everything else is virtue signalling.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
No corporation has strong incentives not to “steal” your data. It’s just not something 99% of consumers care about so if they can make more money doing it they will.
- troupo 3y ago
  > It’s just not something 99% of consumers care about Consumers definitely care about this. That's why there are so many dark patterns to tric consumers into providing their data. Also: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-tracking-opt-out/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-t...
kstrauser 3y ago
> I trust Apple not because they're good. But because selling your data hurts their bottomline. Trust capitalistic incentives and teack records, everything else is virtue signalling. Nailed it. I trust Apple (as much as I’d trust any giant corp, and there are none more giant) because they have a profit motive to sell me privacy-respecting products. They have a few trillion dollars to lose by burning their customers. If Apple were good about privacy because Tim Cook is a nice guy who believed in it even if it were a financial loss, that would be one CEO change away from disappearing. That’s not the case. Their stockholders are raking in cash from it. And if there’s one thing I trust in capitalism, it’s that a smart company will do things that make it more money.
hospitalJail 3y ago
>I trust Apple not because they're good. But because selling your data hurts their bottomline. Trust capitalistic incentives and teack records, everything else is virtue signalling. For this same reason I don't trust Apple. They cut corners on quality and people literally died because of it(Pegasus). I'd have a hard time trusting Apple since they have literally a black box only they have the key to. At least with a FOSS OS, you can look at the code. But really, I can't buy iPhones because I hold a secret on my phone that is too valuable.
nologic01 3y ago
Another year passes by, their revenue sources dry up (or dont meet expectations) and everybody is scrambling for a new stream. They look at their massive data trove, they double check with the lawyers and your nice little trust framework is up in flames. Thats how capitalism works. This is all wrong. Conditioning on goldilocks and accepting least bad solutions is not how the digital society should be built. And make no mistake this is no "lifestyle" issue. Its pretty clear that 99% of life will be controlled by some digital artifact or another and there is no opt out. Tech should be developed and provided on a data sovereign basis by law. People should be prohibited from collecting personal data and applying algorithms that affect people except under strict regulation. Relying on "markets" and "capitalism" to shape such vital aspects of society is political malfunction for the history books.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  > They look at their massive data trove I can tell you from first hand experience their data trove isn't the most valuable for farming out for AdTech. They take in a lot of opt-in telemetry and bend over backwards to anonymize it. There's also very clear demarcation of PII and if you even work around something considered PII you as an engineer need to sign all sorts of extra paperwork. Even if any individual manager or director decided they wanted to leverage PII they'd quickly run afoul of Apple's extremely legally conservative legal department. Because of this data is sanitized and anonymized before it's collected and then further after it's collected.
  - screye 3y ago
    I have been in a big company where a single incident of possible PII leakage happened. (turned out it was a non-issue but) It was the biggest fire I have ever seen, with everyone bringing out every apology, every on call engineer, every lawyer, every HR person and every training there was to make sure it never happened again. Dunno about all of them, but I can confirm that at least some of the big-tech companies treat PII as nuclear fuel that is never to be touched and placed behind the strongest locks the company has available.

by screye 3y ago

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

No corporation has strong incentives not to “steal” your data. It’s just not something 99% of consumers care about so if they can make more money doing it they will.

troupo 3y ago
> It’s just not something 99% of consumers care about Consumers definitely care about this. That's why there are so many dark patterns to tric consumers into providing their data. Also: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-tracking-opt-out/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-t...

kstrauser 3y ago

> I trust Apple not because they're good. But because selling your data hurts their bottomline. Trust capitalistic incentives and teack records, everything else is virtue signalling. Nailed it. I trust Apple (as much as I’d trust any giant corp, and there are none more giant) because they have a profit motive to sell me privacy-respecting products. They have a few trillion dollars to lose by burning their customers. If Apple were good about privacy because Tim Cook is a nice guy who believed in it even if it were a financial loss, that would be one CEO change away from disappearing. That’s not the case. Their stockholders are raking in cash from it. And if there’s one thing I trust in capitalism, it’s that a smart company will do things that make it more money.

hospitalJail 3y ago

>I trust Apple not because they're good. But because selling your data hurts their bottomline. Trust capitalistic incentives and teack records, everything else is virtue signalling. For this same reason I don't trust Apple. They cut corners on quality and people literally died because of it(Pegasus). I'd have a hard time trusting Apple since they have literally a black box only they have the key to. At least with a FOSS OS, you can look at the code. But really, I can't buy iPhones because I hold a secret on my phone that is too valuable.

nologic01 3y ago

Another year passes by, their revenue sources dry up (or dont meet expectations) and everybody is scrambling for a new stream. They look at their massive data trove, they double check with the lawyers and your nice little trust framework is up in flames. Thats how capitalism works. This is all wrong. Conditioning on goldilocks and accepting least bad solutions is not how the digital society should be built. And make no mistake this is no "lifestyle" issue. Its pretty clear that 99% of life will be controlled by some digital artifact or another and there is no opt out. Tech should be developed and provided on a data sovereign basis by law. People should be prohibited from collecting personal data and applying algorithms that affect people except under strict regulation. Relying on "markets" and "capitalism" to shape such vital aspects of society is political malfunction for the history books.

giantrobot 3y ago
> They look at their massive data trove I can tell you from first hand experience their data trove isn't the most valuable for farming out for AdTech. They take in a lot of opt-in telemetry and bend over backwards to anonymize it. There's also very clear demarcation of PII and if you even work around something considered PII you as an engineer need to sign all sorts of extra paperwork. Even if any individual manager or director decided they wanted to leverage PII they'd quickly run afoul of Apple's extremely legally conservative legal department. Because of this data is sanitized and anonymized before it's collected and then further after it's collected.
- screye 3y ago
  I have been in a big company where a single incident of possible PII leakage happened. (turned out it was a non-issue but) It was the biggest fire I have ever seen, with everyone bringing out every apology, every on call engineer, every lawyer, every HR person and every training there was to make sure it never happened again. Dunno about all of them, but I can confirm that at least some of the big-tech companies treat PII as nuclear fuel that is never to be touched and placed behind the strongest locks the company has available.