Tim Cook says Apple’s customers are not its product, unlike Facebook
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I wrote a snarky post first suggesting they do that, but then discovered they already have. I just didn’t notice because I weaned myself off social cancer years ago.
[1] https://calmatters.org/articles/facebook-even-as-it-apologiz...
[2] http://fortune.com/2016/06/30/facebook-google-facial-recogni...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-t...
Although this idea has also been shot down:
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/30/11326016/apple-bank
I think its still a good bet that Apple is going to leverage itself as the go to company for privacy. You pay a premium, but you get a curated ecosystem and no data harvesting.
I think they should take this opportunity to launch a privacy-centric social network and attract more people cast adrift to the walled garden.
Not defending Facebook though. Selling ads shouldn't imply lousy privacy.
Every industry has its vices.
you don't have to buy a phone every year. apple directly supports its phones for 4 or 5 years and even then they don't self destruct. you can even go out in public with an old phone - it is not illegal.
shhhh, someones coming.
HOW ABOUT THAT LOCAL SPORTS TEAM, HUH? <whistle>
Psss. keeping it on the down low, I do think apple should've been louder and more clear about the whole battery thing. Cynics could interpret that as forcing upgrades by making people's phones slow. The repairability and upgradability has also been not great lately, but anyway, my Apple products have still lasted me a solid 3-5 years (:
And it keeps getting better.
EDIT: Downvote? Care to elaborate how this is false?
"everything in excess is bad" - which you were being downvoted for some reason.
Downvoting a reasonable statement like that seemed stupid to me, so i said a "moderate downvote", what i consider to be a contradiction in terms to illustrate how silly i felt that situation was.
Did you pay for the product?
No: You are probably the product.
Yes: You might not also be the product.Microsoft used to say something similar as well. But when they realized that they could make much more money off customer data, they went converted to an ad-centered model with their OS.
The only reason Apple is acting high and mighty is because they are able to rob their customers by charging ridiculously high priced products.
All my comments and writing style, all my alts, and all my opinions are compromised, and it's more a matter of 'when' than 'if' as to the leaking of this data to entities that I emphatically do not want to know all this information.
And linking this information to my person is probably easier than it already seems in my occasional thought experiments.
If you aren't paying for it, you are the product. It's the model that google popularized in the early 2000s. I'm really puzzled ( though I have my theories ) on why FB is being targeted for something everyone does.
> And linking this information to my person is probably easier than it already seems in my occasional thought experiments.
Given enough data points it shouldn't be that hard. Browser fingerprinting, IP address ( even if you have dynamic IP ) and enough raw data, it should be a cakewalk. Throw in browsing pattern analysis, writing analysis, click analysis, etc and they could tie much of everything together.
That was my point.
> Unlike Facebook that deliverily hides or obfuscates the fact that its customers are really the product
How did they hide it? It was their business model. The one they copied from google.
> but the price for Facebook use is not so easy visible.
Are you saying that facebook forced the grandparents to use facebook?
I'm not a fan of either facebook or Apple. My dislike of apple goes back. But I taken aback by the anti-fb posturing justaposed by the pro-google and pro-apple lobby here.
I'm not saying that facebook is good. I'm saying apple isn't good either.
It's so striking how an innocuous comment in every anti-fb thread is met with downvotes and attacks.
I agree with you. Facebook is terrible. That's why I don't use it and never have. But I also don't use apple products because apple is terrible. Is that okay?
Well, it's your choice, they offer "Ars Pro", a subscription which is, they say, not only free of ads, but also free of tracking: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2018/03/ars-pro-now-free-of-tr...
What does this mean? This is completely self-contradictory. Clearly Facebook has demonstrated that regulation is required. How could Tim Cook possibly still say that the best regulation is no regulation? Clearly Tim should want a healthier tech ecosystem than what we have now and clearly be agrees regulation is needed. Very confusing quote.
- Tim Cook
You are arguing with half of the quotation, and ignoring this other half. He doesn't seem to be advocating self-regulation as a practical policy.
Edit: I am now banned from replying to comments on HN again. Probably because of the enormous wave of downvotes that follows me everywhere. I don't understand why HN thinks it is better for me to reply like this than in the now-banned reply box below. Oh well, here is my response to the comment below.
> He is saying that ideally self-regulation is best, but here and now we need regulation because we messed up self regulation.
Ookay, but to me, that says that self-regulation was never going to work, and we should just admit it and move on. We should have had regulation on social media from the beginning. We didn't "mess up" self-regulation. Self-regulation in a hyper-capitalist environment is obviously going to fail. It has been shown time and time again, every day, that corporations will be selfish and do everything they can, legally or not, especially exploiting new dubious legal territory, to extract cash in the short term using dubiously moral and legal methods no matter what.
Corporations should be regulation and it's insane that Tim Cook is just saying "ahhh ooops they messed up, guess it wouldn't work out that way, too bad" but it has always been that way. There was never a world in which Facebook was going to "self-regulate".
To your specific point: I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I tend to agree with Tim Cook. We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it.
I would argue that this is almost bound to happen by definition, purely because the emergence of any new market is into a society that doesn’t regulate it. You say that we “should have had regulation on social media from the beginning” - but what was the beginning? What is it that defines social media versus “traditional” media? Was Isenet social media? Web forums? MySpace?
It’s difficult, in most cases, to preemptively regulate a market. We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood. The implications and danger of social media are harder to understand. What would regulation look like? Is the concern the treatment of personal data? The tracking of behaviour itself? The manipulation of users?
The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
No, you are incorrect. I am/was banned from top-level comments too. This comment turns out to have gone through. I think it is time-based. I don't know how it works. But daily I get banned from making submissions and comments across the site.
> We should assume that markets are unregulated by default; the job of government is to step in when there is a problem or imbalance and use regulation to correct it.
This sounds extremely dangerous, and always allows for large-scale actors to break society's expectations of their good behavior every single day. Society can't function by just trusting huge megacorps to play nice every day. They need to be regulated from the day they start work, not a decade and a half later after so much damage is already caused.
> We’ve moved quite quickly with self-driving cars, but there the dangers are much more obvious and easily understood.
I don't agree with this. In the 90's all the adults in the world were telling kids about the dangers of being online with your real name and all the scary abuse that could come with that. What happened is that the adults forgot this advice. It was already known and it was not a surprise when it happened.
> The point is, I think it’s more complex than “obviously it should have always been regulated”.
No, I don't think it is. Regulation is simple and useful.
But look on the bright side: you have way more karma than me, and only one of my comments has been in the grey, ever.
it's not so clear to me that it's "required". and in fact, I think that detail will be an enormous part of the discussion we get to listen to now.
what's certainly apparent though, is that these systems aren't helping us in the way they are currently structured. it may wind up being the case that our governments use regulation to address the issue, but I am not sure it will solve the larger problem of individuals not having the education (& willpower?) to protect themselves from the sorts of disadvantageous relationships that FANG is willing to engage in with them.
Clearly better regulation has always been required. Otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess.
There's also the fact that "regulation" is a nebulous term that says nothing of what the actual laws are that manage to get passed/implemented. If history is a lesson, we should all be weary of rules written up by people who do not fully understand the domain they are trying to regulate, and who are often lobbied by the very firms that would be most subject to said regulation.
So, no guarantees in the slightest that regulations will bring about a healthier tech ecosystem.
EDIT: From Apple's own website:
The personal information we collect allows us to keep you posted on Apple’s latest product announcements, software updates, and upcoming events. If you don’t want to be on our mailing list, you can opt out anytime by updating your preferences.
The Apple Privacy Policy was updated on January 19, 2018.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
What personal information we collect
* When you create an Apple ID, apply for commercial credit, purchase a product, download a software update, register for a class at an Apple Retail Store, contact us or participate in an online survey, we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, and credit card information.
* When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. Apple will use such information to fulfill your requests, provide the relevant product or service, or for anti-fraud purposes.
* In certain jurisdictions, we may ask for a government issued ID in limited circumstances including when setting up a wireless account and activating your device, for the purpose of extending commercial credit, managing reservations, or as required by law.
BTW: How your iPhone is tracking your every move
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/advice/11056373/How-y...
It's certainly not Apple making its customers into products. Both Google and Facebook are classed as advertising companies, for a reason.
Have you read Google's Privacy Policy?
https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
Wow. All the same stuff as Apple plus Device IDs, actual physical location, WiFi identifiers, pixel tags, and more — All because: tailored advertising. That's what a company-whose-users-are-its-product looks like, by comparison.
BTW: I looked at your scare link: my iPhone had no data there, because it has never had Frequent Locations enabled. Nor has it had Location-Based iAds enabled. YMMV of course.