5 ms·

What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?

by vortegne 2y ago

threeseed 2y ago
Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.
- immibis 2y ago
  Apple makes double money by doing both.
- mdhb 2y ago
  The idea of who you think Apple are in your head and who they are in practice are two wildly different things. https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushes-closer-google https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    I've never heard of "emarketer.com", and it seems less than 100% reliable as a journalistic source at first glance. I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-store-ads-with-ai-powered-buying-tools https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor... Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company. Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising. Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year. So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales. Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart! Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine. (I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
    - mdhb 2y ago
      It’s truly amazing how your reading comprehension and information processing skills seem to change in the face of evidence that doesn’t support your argument. You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant. How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
      - jiggawatts 2y ago
        You chose to link to that source to back up your arguments. I just read the content. Was I not supposed to? I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.
        mdhb 2y ago
        I see the reading comprehension skills seemed to have magically changed yet again in the last five minutes. The question that was asked: > What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product? The response was given: > Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers And then I pointed out that despite how Apple would like to publicly portray themselves and how their fans would love to try and convince you otherwise that it is in fact a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar a year business of theirs where they are doing exactly that. The idea that you are not the product is actively wrong.
        jiggawatts 2y ago
        And I countered that by pointing out that it’s a mere 1.4% of their business. If a pastry shop also sells sausage rolls, does that make them a butcher shop?
        mdhb 2y ago
jiggawatts 2y ago
Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple... My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.) So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices. The Android spec sheet added a line: Encryption: Yes Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever. They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1]. Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice. I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time. Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it. If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else. [1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  > Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3]. Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-whatsapp-threads-china/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w... [4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-ios-document-april-2024 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...
LtWorf 2y ago
Their shills on reddit keep repeating it.

What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?

threeseed 2y ago

Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.

immibis 2y ago
Apple makes double money by doing both.
mdhb 2y ago
The idea of who you think Apple are in your head and who they are in practice are two wildly different things. https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushes-closer-google https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  I've never heard of "emarketer.com", and it seems less than 100% reliable as a journalistic source at first glance. I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-store-ads-with-ai-powered-buying-tools https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor... Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company. Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising. Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year. So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales. Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart! Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine. (I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
  - mdhb 2y ago
    It’s truly amazing how your reading comprehension and information processing skills seem to change in the face of evidence that doesn’t support your argument. You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant. How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      You chose to link to that source to back up your arguments. I just read the content. Was I not supposed to? I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.
      - mdhb 2y ago
        I see the reading comprehension skills seemed to have magically changed yet again in the last five minutes. The question that was asked: > What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product? The response was given: > Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers And then I pointed out that despite how Apple would like to publicly portray themselves and how their fans would love to try and convince you otherwise that it is in fact a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar a year business of theirs where they are doing exactly that. The idea that you are not the product is actively wrong.
        jiggawatts 2y ago
        And I countered that by pointing out that it’s a mere 1.4% of their business. If a pastry shop also sells sausage rolls, does that make them a butcher shop?
        mdhb 2y ago

jiggawatts 2y ago

Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple... My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.) So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices. The Android spec sheet added a line: Encryption: Yes Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever. They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1]. Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice. I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time. Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it. If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else. [1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.

dns_snek 2y ago
> Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3]. Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-whatsapp-threads-china/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w... [4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-ios-document-april-2024 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...

LtWorf 2y ago

Their shills on reddit keep repeating it.