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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory that the only reason Apple is today's beacon of user privacy is that they couldn't manage to compete in either the ad (iAd), mail (at least not at G-scale) or social network world (see: Ping).

The only path left for them was to say they were all about user privacy. If Apple had succeeded wildly in any of those three spaces, I think they'd be caught up like Google, Facebook et al.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing for the tech ecosystem, but I do think it was lucky positioning on their part.

Interested to hear opposing opinion on this.

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iAd did poorly because Apple was unwilling to share data about their customers with advertisers.

>Advertisers Not Thrilled With Apple’s Practice Of Protecting Its Users’ Data... rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not-thrilled-w...

Ping was intended to integrate with Facebook, but Jobs canceled that integration at the last second, citing “onerous terms that we could not agree to”. It's uncertain if those terms were privacy related.

http://allthingsd.com/20100902/steve-jobs-on-why-facebook-is...

The only problem with that theory is that Apple is a much older company stemming from the days that the only way to make money was to sell things to consumers. Nearly all of that company's infrastructure and inertia has always been that way. They may be opportunistically touting privacy now like they're doing us a favor (and they kinda are...), but the main favor they did was simply never commit massive resources to a pivot to data-driven services. iAd, for example, was basically a "me too!" way of creating revenue for early iOS app devs (because Google's Android was the only competition in that market).

For all of the other companies mentioned: data was basically their only asset and business model, and they were started 25+ years after Apple.

(Edit for grammar)

Or they realized that hardware and software (App Store) is the better long term approach. Hardware is what Apple has always been known for and Jobs in general if you add in Next.

Google and FB sell ads and their products are built around better selling ads. Privacy is counterintuitive to their business model. Apple and even Microsoft can and should focus on privacy because their business models won’t be impacted as much. They can strengthen their relationships with customers who buy into their ecosystems.

Android is the oddball for google and I don’t know enough to comment about privacy.

Google collects tons of data on Android through their Apps (Chrome, Search, Maps) in connection with Play Services.

That doesn't seem like a less sustainable model, it seems better in the longer term. As the hardware market is saturating Apple has a harder time selling newer phones (turn up the marketing machine), but Google can still sell personalised ads.

Maybe not directly an opposing opinion, but I'll point out that Apple makes more money than any ad, email, or social media company, so I think it's hard to argue that Apple has somehow screwed up as a business.

In other words, to me it seems reasonable to think that they affirmatively chose a strategy that has worked out for them--not that their strategy was forced upon them by their shortcomings.

I would also quibble with your characterization that there is some difference between the ad, email, or a social network worlds. Google and Facebook are ad companies--look at their revenue. Apple is not.

I will say that I don't think Steve Jobs set out 18 years ago to turn Apple into a privacy company. I think it's reasonable to say that Apple concentrated on products and services, and discovered privacy as a differentiating strategy along the way.

But it's just as true to say that Google and Facebook discovered data-driven advertising along the way too. Both projects started out without a business model at all.

> ... so I think it's hard to argue that Apple has somehow screwed up as a business.

I don't think anyone was stating this. Merely that their ventures into spaces that typically would be privacy-hostile didn't work out for them anywhere near as well as it did for Google and Facebook.

OP's point seems to be saying something more along the lines that perhaps those particular failures helped them decide to stay (or become) more privacy-focused.

It was becoming plain a few years ago (by 2015 at the latest) that Apple didn't have the aptitude to compete in big Data or machine learning. It was very clever of them to bet on privacy - the one strategy that has little need for big Data and ML.

The other big bet is that something might happen to convince users that privacy is good. We'll see how that plays out - users aren't particularly bothered by Facebook revelations as their DAUs attest. Kids are growing up with microphones in their bedrooms (Amazon echo dot for kids) so privacy will be a deeply erodes concept ~15 years from now (if it isn't already).

If that’s true then it makes me that much more confident in Apple’s privacy practices. I will trust a profit motive to respect privacy much more than a CEO or leadership team that respects (or claims to respect) privacy purely as an ethical principle.

This doesn't make sense. A CEO who touts it as an ethical principle, if they're being honest, is likely to actually try to protect your privacy. For profit reasons, there's no reason to actually protect your privacy as long as they keep up appearances.

There are certainly legal reasons to not directly lie about the privacy practices of your company. I’m sure it has happened before, but are we really worried about, for example, Facebook lying about WhatsApp messages being end-to-end encrypted? Surely researchers would expose that lie pretty quickly.

And CEOs and leadership teams come and go. If the only thing making a company respect your privacy is the principles of the CEO, and especially if that respect for privacy is bad for the company’s bottom line, then you can bet that CEO is going to have a change of heart after a board meeting or is going to get fired as soon as there’s a bad quarter.

Microsoft was there in ~2011-2014. Check these out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSIlUXOH2iA

From Scroogled to "telemetry" collecting user keyboard input in 4 years.

Interesting theory. However, if you look back and watch many of Steve Job's interviews, you will find that he has been a long time proponent of protecting user data.

Additionally, he has also stated many times to make sure to inform users when an action involving privacy is about to take place "repeatedly and in plain English". Though I am not sure how much of this hardline stance on privacy still exist within Apple today.

I agree, if the success was there they'd follow it.

But to be fair I think Steve Jobs was pretty interested in privacy and put some of that philosophy in the company. So they were already pursuing privacy goals but there would be these conflicts of interest that they would eventually have to resolve.

Luckily they continued to suck at social networking and many online things. It works better for them to double down on privacy.

What if the causal relationship was reversed? Perhaps the success wasn't there in those areas due to a previously established philosophy concerning privacy.

Grasping and purely conjecture obviously, just putting it out there.

This seems reasonable to me. If the leadership decisions and the culture are a constant "drag" towards an organization being competitive in these areas, the organization will do badly at them, and be unable to compete. This can be seen as a feature rather than a bug, of course depending on where you sit.

I think it's important to bear in mind that Apple's goal (generally) isn't to do cross-platform social apps. iMessage is a success because it bridges to non-Apple platforms via SMS. Everything else is largely siloed to Apple devices. This naturally limits them.

Are you familiar with this patent application?

http://ipwatchdog.com/patents/US20090265214.pdf

Oh, the good invention of "Page Has Moved"

Sorry about that. Try these:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...

They certainly used the data they had from their franchisees to decide where to put their apple stores.

That may be true, but I am not complaining.

Note that I do not fully agree with the parent.

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