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Comment by gizmodo59 | Hacker News Reader

I ve said this before but I ll say it again, between GOOG/FB/MSFT Apple seems to be doing more to privacy and it’s mainly in part due to their business model where most of their revenue comes just from selling products and not ads. (May be MSFT is more diversified than the other two). It will be interesting to see how this plays out in their favor.

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Key words being "seem to," which is due solely to a marketing construction. They make devices that you can't (realistically) develop for without giving your credit card or bank information. When the iPhone was released, you couldn't even use the device at all without an iTunes account with payment information.

These sort of replies always show up in these threads. They’re also absolutely, 100% wrong. About as clueless as the classic “less space than a Nomad” line.

Apple isn’t buying your credit and loyalty card transaction history.

Apple isn’t storing plaintext transcripts of your chats, and using access to them as a tool for backroom political deals.

Apple’s former HQ wasn’t turned into Palantir’s HQ.

People need to stop making these sort of comparisons. It doesn’t make you look smart. It makes you seem either insanely pedantic or completely uninformed about what the other companies ARE doing. You can criticize Apple for their pricing model, the uselessness of iTunes, whatever ... Privacy is not one of those options. The closer you are to this actual issue (and I’m pretty damn close to it), the more you know that this is the truth.

As much as you try to deflect, my statement is factually correct about what Apple IS and WAS doing and just one of many reasons why Apple is worse than alternatives for privacy.

> Apple’s former HQ wasn’t turned into Palantir’s HQ.

What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Might have been true ages ago but I set up a few iPhone 7’s for staff last week and you could get past go without payment details attached to the iCloud account.

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