Forcing Facebook to clearly list all of this for the facebook account is great, but then failing to disclose this for their own account seems like double standard.
Just like having their own separate Ad Tracking switch which is on by default. (And even hidden under "System Services" on macOS!)
If you choose to use iCloud to store your contacts (and you can choose any other service that implements the carddav standard) Apple declares the information is transmitted and stored encrypted and can’t be used for any other purpose.
iMessage can be MITM’d by Apple when requested by the government and you, the user, will have no way of verifying your correspondent’s public key (unlike whatsapp, signal, keybase etc).
it’s probably nothing to do with USA law enforcement. my reasonable guess is they don’t care much and would go full private. i think the reason here is china. that way they don’t have to have a separate china policy which would draw undue attention to that point.
No, what is constantly being brought out as a huge negative when talking about Google and Facebook is them using your data and data about you to make money.
If you do not want this to happen, do not turn on the optional iCloud backups.
But anyway, although Apple could decrypt the other data, they declare they don’t. Which is what the labels are about.
But do they bring all that data together, correlate it, and sell it?
"You want to advertise to 65 year old white people[1] in QAnon so you can pedal a very specific kind of fear? No problem."
"You want to buy access to black women under 30? We gotcha!"
That is what Facebook does which Apple doesn't.
[1] I know FB doesn't actually allow targeting based on race anymore. They do allow targeting based on interests though which can easily amount to the same thing.
Maybe I misinterpret the idea behind this list.
To me, its not listing all the things that the company knows about you, its listing all the information that app reads about you.
In other terms, this is what Apple knows when I disable the iCloud and only use iMessage. And this is what Facebook knows when I only use it though that messenger and nothing else.
I understand what you’re saying. If the App is only collecting certain amount of information on its own, then they should only list that right? ... But that’s unfair with the rest of the vendors because they are forced to list everything they track, while iMessage obscures it by saying “the app doesn’t collect anything”...yet the phone is and iMessage is the default messaging system for iOS.
I’m a loyal Apple user but this is anti-competitive behavior. As much as I love Apple’s privacy focus, it seems that they’re using it as a proxy to unfairly compete with other companies and claim that they only care about the end’s user privacy, which is clearly not true.
Apple does and will use your data to push Apple products. They should be transparent about that.
Apple's News+ advertising empire? App Store advertising? Is there any evidence at all that they cross pollinate data in either of these contexts? If so, it certainly isn't clear based on the advertising I see in News+
Much of the stuff you are complaining about is "collected" because it's needed by other services. The real question is whether the data is reasonably siloed and how easy it is for Apple or third party's (governments, etc) to access and abuse.
Explain how?
Unlike others os/phones where such things are turned on at every opportunity
Maybe I got to that state because I was being badgered? It’s been long enough though I can’t recall.
Might be worth a shot if the risk is acceptable enough to you vs the badger.
For me, it would go a long way towards seeing Apple as not just trying to leverage their platform to be anti-competitive, but as a company who is honestly protecting my privacy.
Some feature flags/settings across all the OSes get hidden, are non-obvious, on by default, or are flat out using dark patterns (looking at you Win10) but in general I assume the default state (for all OSes) is a combination of reducing support incidents, easiest on-boarding, and trying to push some corporate strategic objective summed up as keep the average user happy enough to stick around and possibly give us more money.
Any app I install on said OS, may want to access this information but without all the permissions explainers I have no idea what it’s going to want or why.
Again, I assume the OS has access to all of this because it’s the OS it either needs it or is the manager of the info and access broker.
To sum up my thought, I guess I agree that there’s a double standard but disagree that it’s necessarily bad or shady- but that’s because I already had a double standard in mind when I think about OS vs App.
Specific to ad-tracking and Apple: I have no proof for my belief but I believe Apple who primarily wants to sell me hardware and has made public acknowledgements of the importance of privacy, including making noticeable improvements to their OS, is significantly less likely to abuse my privacy than any other OS vendor out there.
I’m not saying this as a whataboutism, I just base it on my perceptions given all the things you just flat out can’t turn off in Win10 and that Google literally makes their money off of getting ads to your eyeballs and Android’s permissions are a dumpster fire nightmare for privacy.
I feel (again, no real proof) that the Apple eco-system is providing me the best _mainstream and low-effort_ steps to privacy protection vs the others, but I concede that it’s probably not good enough in many ways.
i like to call it end to end to end encryption. i came up with that for zoom but it applies to iMessage as well.