In comparison to Google, for example, the difference in what the two companies want to know about you is huge.
Google has announced that it buys copies of your credit card purchase data from third party data brokers.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607938/google-now-tracks-...
It's one thing to store data necessary to complete a financial transaction with your customer. Buying a customer's entire credit card purchase history regardless of who they are doing business with is an entirely different thing.
Really? They don't collect any info in their app store / itunes? That seems hard to believe..
In general, companies like Facebook and Google view personal data as an asset and seek to acquire as much as possible. But Apple views personal data as a liability and seeks to have as little as possible.
But make no mistake, Apple won't think twice before handing over data to the government or any other party if it makes business sense, as they did in China.
Also, your China example is also a straw man because Apple's terms in China explicitly allowed for that before they even sold a single phone there. In the US, for example, Apple isn't able to provide personal data to authorities. It can only provide information that doesn't live on-device and that's stored unencrypted which, as of right now, is nothing unless a user explicitly asks for it to be stored unencrypted.
I don't know if ads on AppleTV to be part of iAds or not, but I was a little surprised to see this menu on my AppleTV today:
Settings > General > Privacy > Advertising
The choices for this are Limit Ad Tracking, Reset Advertising Identifier, and About Advertising and Privacy.
Apple has an entire web page showing how to opt-out of targeted advertising on its devices, including the iPhone:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074
The most telling one is
Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Location-Based Apple Ads
Second, did you read that page at all, then? That's not at all the same as advertising based on your personal data. That's Apple showing you App Store promotions based on the searches you're typing in from the App Store and is completely localized to the App Store and App Store search. It's what allows you to go to the App Store and have the McDonald's sponsored ad show up when you visit a McDonald's. The only information being sent is your search term, anonymously, and the location-based ads are served based on iBeacons. None of your personal info is ever sent outgoing from your phone.
>Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users,but what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad.
>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, AdAge says. And it’s well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.
>what it doesn’t do is hand over the keys to all that data and let advertisers plug into it directly with their own data-mining and targeting software. That’s not standard for the ad industry and that’s likely the reason a few Madison Avenue feathers are ruffled over their approach.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not-thrilled-w...
Many people in the general public don't realize that you can have an iPhone and not have a computer, as long as you enable iCloud so you can migrate all of your apps and other information from one iPhone to another.
If you're doing an upgrade from one iPhone to another, you only have to turn on your iCloud for a time before the upgrade, then once you migrate, you can turn it off again.
Though, if you have no computer backup you should really keep iCloud on all the time so that if your phone gets eaten by a tiger, all your stuff can appear on your new phone.
I remember Mr. Jobs talking about this once.
Not the tiger part. That was just me.
idevicepair and idevicebackup2 are the relevant utilities, I've used them successfully on macOS and Linux.
For now. When their growth, or margins start shrinking, Wall Street will push hard on them to collect and monetize this data.
Remember when you paid a premium for cable TV, because it didn't have advertisements? Now, you still pay a premium, but it's 33% ads.
No, cable originated as means to deliver broadcast channels, which had ads. You never paid for basic cable because it did have ads, because it always did. You paid a premium because you got a clear signal not degraded by distance and atmospheric conditions. And later because it offered channels (still ad supported) that you couldn't get over the air at all.
Now, even later, it was possible to pay a premium on top of basic cable to get additional channels without ads, but those premium channels still don't have ads.
Building weapons wasn't in Google's DNA either, yet Maven happened. It was only shut down because the pushback succeeded. Its success was not a sure thing.
Corporations aren't people - the only principles or ethical compasses they follow are those of their employees. Employees come and go, and, in the case of leadership, can be fired by the owners.
There's a long history of tech companies that have done a 180, in terms of their DNA. Microsoft, SUN (Having been bought by Oracle), Google, are some of the more prominent ones.