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Comment by ForrestN | Hacker News Reader

Apple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they do not do this...

Apple has plenty of its own ethical issues, starting with 350,000 Chinese workers paid $1.90 an hour in dubious conditions.

Well, that particular issue is not really Apple's "own" - pretty much every single tech company on earth benefits from cheap foreign labor.

But then they'll tell you that these employees are very happy to work at such factories, because they make way more money than they would ever make on the farm in their hometown, and often work there a year or two to save as much money as they can before moving back to where they lived before.

(Apple actually does way better than most other companies on that front - see http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/)

Does it open an entire rabbit hole about the ethics of globalization? Sure. Is it a strictly black and white issue? ...heh.

They do.

Source?

Source that they don't?

I'd presume that they do absent a credible source they don't.

They don't offer any services that would benefit from it.

They have ads: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/search-ads/

Search advertising doesn't require massive data collection, just bidding on search terms. Anyways, I bet anything Apple makes on app store ads is a rounding error compared to their hardware business. They probably don't care that much, and certainly have no need to go into the surveillance business.

They have audience options for ads (like age/gender/location, see http://searchads.apple.com/how-it-works/#features), meaning they collect data about their users as well.

Also, they colluded with other companies to, effectively, keep employees' wages down. Amount of money they saved was probably a rounding error for them in this case too.

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