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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

What about Amazon and Apple? Why is Google the only recipient with scrutiny? Especially since the merger hasn't happened yet.

You should be frightened about all of them.

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Why is Google the only recipient with scrutiny?

They're not. The EU is investigating Amazon[1] and Apple[2] as well.

Your complaint is really "Why isn't every article written to be a general point about all big companies?" as if there's no value in writing about specific examples. What's wrong with writing about Google in particular? A focused article is just as useful and interesting as a more generic one.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...

Apple makes money from people buying their hardware and services. They don’t make a significant amount of money from selling targeted advertisements. Amazon and Google do.

Maybe that's what Google has been trying to do here with diversifying their revenue sources, similar to what they are attempting to do with GCP. Look at the amount of control they have been adding on Pixel phones on what apps and services can access, even Google's.

The difference is Google doesn't stop monetizing your data when they start selling premium hardware.

How do you know this to be true? Are they using Nest data to monetize something?

Apple also tried their hands at iAds, in the end companies will do whatever works best for them. Considering Apple has made privacy a marketing feature for their devices, I am quite sure Google would want to have that playbook as well for their premium devices.

They don't monetize your data when you pay them (GSuite).

Only because they have margins of more than 20 times the cost of manufacturing, the day they stop having success selling iphones and more at such huge margins is the same day they will use all that data to make money from targeted advertisement, some think that day will never come because they have loyal buyers but only time will tell.

First line of the abstract: "The European Commission is conducting an in-depth investigation of the Google/Fitbit deal.". They are perusing a specific legal angle to investigate Google/Fitbit.

Apple doesn't have your health data. They are on device, and any work with the data (statistics) is also done on the device and not somewhere in the Cloud. They don't want your data, it's not their business model. Sure - Health data is backed up over iCloud, but this is encrypted and again Apple doesn't have a way to view the data outside of an Apple device.

Do you have a source for iCloud backups being end-to-end encrypted?? As far as I know, everything in iCloud is just encrypted (i.e. Apple has the decryption key). In fact, law enforcement often asks for data from iCloud because unlocking the physical phone is harder.

Health data in particular

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204351

Back up your Health data Health information is stored in iCloud and gets encrypted as it goes between iCloud and your device, and while it's stored in iCloud. End-to-end encryption requires iOS 12 and two-factor authentication. To stop storing your Health data in iCloud, go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud and turn off Health. If you aren't using iCloud, you can back up your information in Health by encrypting your iTunes backup. The information that you create or gather about yourself is under your control, and it's encrypted with your passcode when you lock your iPhone

>Apple doesn't have a way to view the data outside of an Apple device. >Apple doesn't have your health data.

I don't believe that any of this is true.

iPhone or no, your data is "out there", and you don't own it.

The scrutiny happens due to the merger upcoming merger. It requires permission of the European Commission, which raises those questions.

I don't understand this whataboutism.

Google is under scrutiny here doesn't exclude others from being under scrutiny.

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