Why aren't Apple's apps themselves also having to ask for permission? I personally do not trust Apple one bit, just as I do not trust Facebook. So why is it so much harder to disable Apple's tracking, compared to Facebook's?
Something like this could have grounds for anti-competitive behaviour.
If you look at the list of example reasons [1] that would require an app to ask for tracking permission, they are (broadly) in two buckets: correlating and/or consuming user data from multiple sources, and sharing data with a data broker for advertising purposes.
Apple does not share data outside of itself, and their apps do not display ads.
-- [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...
Except for the App Store and Apple News, AFAIK.
The App Store does display ads, but those are based on advertisers bidding for keywords in the search terms.
This is, however, very different, as you point out.
Google gets this much better - with a ton of SAAS / biz focused apps. So I imagine google is tracking me somehow (I use google search / chrome etc) and apple does not seem to be doing that good a job.
And when an app doesn’t ask, does that just mean there is no tracking going on or is it some nefarious scheme to achieve who knows what?
The nefarious option will probably become most popular on the interwebs, obviously. I can already see the HN posts: “Pages caught loading an asset from apple.com, violating their own tracking policy! Is Apple doomed?”
Now, that’s not to say that the iPhone setting guarantees that Apple is not up to something sketchy. We can’t tell what’s going on under the hood or in their servers, but if we really wanted to be extremists about privacy, then we have to resort to apps that we’ve built and self-hosted ourselves.
I agree that Apple cares about this stuff, but your story doesn’t really show it.
> I will give one more concrete example: the crash reporter system would send me a detailed stack trace, but NOT the original document. I was told explicitly that this was done for reasons of privacy ... I had no idea who the user was or what was in the document.
So you’ve had access to everything at Apple in your long career there, investigated it deeply the whole time and you’ve found nothing out of sorts. Got it.
This jives with what I’ve read about Apple’s internal culture - that there’s no compartmentalization at all and employees can roam freely around the halls collecting whatever information they want from any department.
I feel good now that you’ve investigated your own company and found no issues! Police unions should look into using this tactic of self-investigation. It seems quite effective!
(I hope I protected your privacy by removing the irrelevant parts of your comment. Sorry I had to paste them in there but you deleted them and then my response made no sense.
Also, sorry to have to use all of that sarcasm but you could’ve just answered the question. It’s Apple. Apple investigates if Apple apps for doing any sort of improper data collection.)
(Edit: I got this part wrong - sorry wayneftw! It's particularly bad that you bullied another user into removing what was probably an interesting story. That makes the thread strictly worse, whether or not you felt like it answered your specific question.)
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? The intention is curious conversation—not bashing other people or their positions, even if you feel like they have wrong positions.
That's not what happened. They removed it before I even posted a reply. By the time my reply came up, their story was gone and I had to navigate backwards to copy it. Please look at timestamps or something and remove this warning.
Aside from that, the story was not interesting. It just said that they worked there for a number of years and that their coworkers seemed trustworthy. Also that they couldn't get user documents along with stack traces. I left the most salient bits.
> Personal attacks will get you banned here.
Where's the personal attack? I responded directly to what their comment said, nothing more. And, I didn't get personal - I got sarcastic about what they said. And I apologized for it.
Re personal attack - if you go after what another person is saying that aggressively and use the second-person pronoun a lot, it starts to bleed into personal attack. Particularly "you’ve found nothing out of sorts. Got it" struck me as attacking the other person's integrity.
So I am unable to infer that Apple consistently puts privacy (and the right to privacy) ahead of profit.
Their exact statement said: "We are writing to notify that your application will be removed from the China App Store because it includes content that is illegal in China..."
(To be clear, I'm not suggesting China is righteous, just that Apple still has to follow laws, even if it doesn't like them)
The CCP is awful in many ways but I can understand Apple preferring to follow the law rather than lose their second biggest market.
They are. This question is based on a false premise.
I see it repeatedly. It’s starting to sound a lot like “have you stopped beating your wife yet.
They do ask, either on every OS install or upgrade (things like Siri) or first use (non-core apps). If you look at the various privacy settings, Apple’s own apps are listed and you have the same controls to block or limit the data they can access.