4 ms·
> How does one prove that Apple does not use data from customers for its commercial gain. The company is ridiculously secretive and non-transparent. Apple does
by appplication 3y ago
> How does one prove that Apple does not use data from customers for its commercial gain. The company is ridiculously secretive and non-transparent.
Apple does use customer data for commercial gain. But it does so anonymously and in an aggregated fashion. I think it’s fair to be skeptical here, but Apple does take their users data privacy much more seriously than their competitors. I think it helps to understand where their value proposition is aligned compared to the competition.
At Apple, privacy and security are core features of the product. They tend to push personalization features down to the device level to avoid building customer profiles in the cloud. They are generally ok with not releasing a feature if they cannot do so in a way that respects data security and privacy.
Compare this to Google, whose philosophy is that customer data is important to protect, but they expect their customers are alright with Google building a highly tailored profile to them. Google tends to process customer data in the cloud and shares this profile across their product lines. They believe that they can build better products and features by centralizing customer data.
For Apple, there isn’t any reason for them to try to get a secret edge by telling the public they’re not using data and secretly doing so. Their customers would be rightfully weirded out if they saw over-personalized products in ways they didn’t authorize. A large part of their competitive moat is actually denying companies like Facebook access to their users data.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago> At Apple, privacy and security are core features of the product. This sounds like a press release.
- appplication 3y agoProbably because it’s their value proposition. The point being Apple spends a shit ton of money on privacy and security because it’s exactly what they market. It’s a bit of a naive and paranoid take to think they’re secretly disregarding that internally and actually doing the complete opposite.
- Veserv 3y agoThen they can put that value proposition into legally binding, non-revokable terms. Until then, I see no reason to believe a person on the internet over a trillion dollar company executives and lawyers who actively avoid making any contractual obligations to support their marketing claims.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoYou don't need to "believe a person on the internet", just go look up all of the privacy-respecting features and options of iOS (and related services) we have today. I think "contractual obligations" sounds like an unfairly high standard to hold Apple to. It'd be great if we lived in a utopia where corporations were genuinely looking out for our best interests. We don't. We live in a world where corporations are relentless profit-seeking vampires, and in that world Apple is an uncommonly benevolent mega-corp relative to its peers. This benevolence is not just a factor of being mostly built by morally "good" people[0], it's also a matter of what Apple has chosen as its market niche. They build privacy-first technology because that's what they tell us they're selling us, and it's why we buy it. It's profitable for them. It's good for us. It's a mutually beneficial situation. [0]I think there's an argument to be made that because Apple has now spent a decade positioning itself this way, it probably attracts the type of employee who believes in privacy as a human right and is largely made up of people who genuinely do believe it's the "right" thing to do.