French data protection watchdog casts doubt on Apple’s privacy compliance
politico.eu
politico.eu
The active phrase is that Apple ‘appears to be doing personalize advertising’ without first asking for permission.
The interesting question is are they actually doing so or have the regulators just been told they are by Facebook?
Last time this was discussed here, the consensus was that they aren’t doing targeted advertising - the only advertising they do being keyword based ads in the App Store.
I know of some bigger companies thinking about doing this.
I strongly believe (and I don't actually like Apple very much) they are one of the few compliant to GDPR in the EU.
No other company is allowed to use smoke and mirrors and be granted the benefit of doubt by it's customers.
And it's extra concerning knowing Apple is constantly riddled with scandals with product quality, security, ethics, etc... Yet their marketing claims anything but.
I also smell FUD in your post. You are one of those who likes to jump on the Apple bashing bandwagon whilst having no substantiated facts to back you up.
You allege poor product quality ? I have been a long-term Mac user since the 80's. Either I am spectacularly lucky, but I have never encountered any scandalous product quality in any Apple desktop, laptop or phone that I have owned. Infact I've always found their quality to be top-notch compared to the litany of issues I've had with PC's over the years.
Security ? Again FUD. By and large Apple do an excellent job on security, they do their best. Their overall track record remains better than Microsoft.
Also my friend, cut the crap, we're all serious techies here on Ycombinator ... name me one technology company that has had zero security issues ? Even the cybersecurity vendors (who you would expect to be on top of their game) have all had their fair share of high-profile security issues. ;-)
Apple laptop butterfly keyboard failures - many years before they gave up on it. You may have heard of it.
> Security ?
MacOS root authentication bypass by using root and then hitting enter button with the password field empty. I don't think there's been a bigger authentication failure anywhere else?
Apple products are pleasing to the eye, but there are pain points. Some users get very defensive of Apple, that can get pretty annoying.
The butterfly keyboard issue is so noteworthy because it is a dramatic departure from the normal quality levels of Apple products. The only other major (modern) hardware quality issue in an Apple product I can think of is the iPhone 4 antenna thing from 2010; I would be hard-pressed to find another hardware company that's shipped as few problematic products on that time frame, and for many companies a butterfly keyboard style quality issue would be unremarkable! Can you name a company that does consistently better than Apple on hardware quality?
The Apple root password bypass was not good (four years ago), but the set of people with a threat model such that this really mattered is not large (I think it was only ever proven to work with physical access to the device, for example). The "goto fail" bug[1] was also quite bad, in fairness. But on the same time frame neither of those really registers as a vulnerability on the same level of impact as Heartbleed[2], Cloudbleed[3], Spectre[4] and related issues, or even the more recent Solarwinds[5] or Exchange[6] hacks. Every software company has security incidents; Apple is absolutely not an outlier or unusually insecure.
[1] https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html [2] https://heartbleed.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_gov... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Microsoft_Exchange_Server...
My read in the article is that they are using the "data on your device" to suggest apps you might want to install?
Developers can only install using Apple provided tools that could send info to Apple (and if they don’t, that’s a rounding error, anyways)
They certainly track, per account, what apps e@ch account ever downloaded (App Store — Account — Personalised Recommendations — Purchased Apps & Games, or directly via App Store — Purchased)
This is what is in question.
What is the terminal referring to here?
#1 Lock-in users, create requirements/incentives for them to maintain their identity on Apple servers
#2 Create (anonymized?) behavioural profiles for your recommendation engines and other services
#3 Prevent 3rd parties from gaining comparable data or direct-access to your users (emphasize that you only do that to protect the users' privacy, and how you're on a holy crusade against nefarious entities)
#4 Become the exclusive owner for any monetization of your userbase
I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple advertising concept is sufficiently encapsulated to be in full compliance with GDPR, and surely everyone welcomes their measures taken to ensure privacy.
But still, this direction is not going to create new practices in the advertising industry in long-term, it is just putting the already-large companies which can control the user at a very low layer (Smartphone OS) in full control of the value-chain for everything he does on top of it (physical or virtual).
Adding another consent-popup might satisfy GDPR but will do nothing to change this overall path. If 2-3 companies knowing ALL about me are replacing 50000 companies only knowing very specific bits, I am not sure that the commitment to only use my data but never sell it will be enough to keep my privacy protected...