It isn't just marketing. This is how the alignment of incentives works. A company's incentives are aligned with the people who pay them. Apple's are aligned with those that buy phones. Google and Facebook's are aligned with those that buy ads.
Apple's true incentive is to provide value for their shareholders.
If they can improve the value provided to shareholders by hoovering up information while also maintaining consumer confidence and sales then why would they not?
I think that Apple's incentives are better aligned with my desires for privacy, but it's only an assumption.
Because this sort of thing inevitably leaks? Apple has a formula that demonstrably works, a formula that everyone can directly observe making them an utterly stupid amount of money. It would be the height of stupidity to risk their unparalleled monetary successes to pursue a few dirty little crumbs.
Don't attach these emotions where they are not appropriate. Apple is a for-profit company. If they will be pressed hard by US government behind closed doors, they will bulge and you won't know about it, why should you (maybe in 10 years as part of some leak). If they will decide to change their strategy, they will. They have 0 moral issues hiding gazillions of cash offshore from IRS. Just like any other company out there.
Simple fact is, most people don't care about security. I work in IT, and I have numerous friends with iPhones, but exactly 0 of them cares about extra potential security when choosing phones, most have no clue about these issues. Regular people choose Apple because of Apple and how things look and feel, and how they are perceived among others as a status indicator.
Apple has engineered their products to be unbreakable by Apple. That says a lot about their desire to cooperate!
Apple's billions held internationally aren't hidden, everyone knows where it is. And it was never money destined to be "on-shore" in the first place – it's profits from retail sales which occurred in Europe and elsewhere. Their offices in Ireland have the Apple logo on them and they're one of Ireland's largest taxpayers. Everything they do is on the public record. That money wasn't expatriated from the USA, the IRS isn't owed any of it.
According to their privacy policy[0], they comply with requests by the government for user data and inform the user unless gagged.
> In the second half of 2016, Apple received between 5,750 and 5,999 National Security Orders.
If their products are unbreakable, how can they provide this data to the government?
[0]: https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...
Saiya-jin, your comments all appear to be flagged and dead. You may want to contact a mod about this.
it's going to be less than 1%
... and where are they going to go?
I’d be pissed for an hour but at the end of the day my phone, laptop, watch, TV and car all syncing my music and crap with no effort is too appealing to scoff at.
Hell if I found out they had a meat locker of dead kittens hidden in the basement of 1 Infinite Loop Id probably stay loyal.
What makes you so confident? How do you know Apple thinks of itself as a hardware company whose incentives are aligned with those that buy phones? Their marketing certainly has made a lot of people think that, but, well that's just marketing.
Apple hasn't exactly always stuck with one identity. In 2007 one could have easily said that Apple is "a computer company" and not "a phone company" like Nokia.
Ultimately though, Google and Apple are incentivize to collect data for a lot more reasons than just selling ads. A lot of software functionality on phones benefits from rich user data. Apple may well be collecting data to drive better software experiences, and how much of that data they'll keep in-house vs sharing with third-parties is anybody's guess.
Even if you only consider advertising and hardware in simple terms, Apple is very directly incentivize to advertise new iPhones to current iPhone users. They want you to crave new models as soon as they come out, and to think your current model is kind of lame and old. Why wouldn't they be tempted to leverage user data to do that?
Finally, the vast majority of iPhone users probably aren't so sensitive to data security (the market of people who are is pretty small). So I doubt Apple cares that much about their perception among security-conscious people.
That sounds great but it can not be further from the truth. So are you saying that Comcast and the telcos of the world incentives are aligned with their users?
You buy a game, do you think that it means that the game producer has your best interest at hearth? Apple is filthy rich not because they have users as top priority, but because the extract as much as they can from them. They have a very clear lock-in policy where they try to avoid their users moving to other platforms if they wish so (iMessage anyone). Is that really in their users interest?
> Apple's are aligned with those that buy phones.
For all we know, that's what they want you to believe. The fact that you are so certain this is how they are incentivized could just mean that they did a fantastic job at marketing and making their users believe this image of themselves they've worked on.