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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

For me it's a question of incentives. Apple makes the vast majority of its income selling hardware to people. That makes me the customer. Google makes the vast majority of its income selling user data to advertisers. That makes me the product and advertisers the customer. Which company has more of an incentive to compromise my privacy by accessing my data in a dishonest way?

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Thats a bit naive approach. Both (and other) companies exist primarily to earn money to owners. If Apple will find it can extract even more money from consumers on top of hardware, ie overpriced forced walled gardens called app shops, it will. As long as it doesn't affects its main money pipeline which are devices. Like it or not, most folks don't care about nor understand privacy, so Apple has a lot of leeway there.

The idea of taking Apple seriously on privacy is a bit of bad joke when they block Firefox having ublock origin or implement at least the same for its Safari, and give users full option to install plugins for this browser (even if only from Apple-curated plugin store). It would be trivial for army of Apple devs to create similar blocking, yet they just curate what ads you see based on what they think is maximum acceptable amount & type for users, so no real privacy choice there.

I've heard even comments here on HN about how its actually a good thing to not have this freedom as 'power user'. Can't say I know how to respond to such schizophrenia so I'll pass on that, everybody can make up their own opinion.

Apple - fix this, and I will start taking your PR about security seriously. Till then, I simply can't since its obvious you talk more than actually do where it matters most, the wild unruly Internet of these days.

On the contrary, I’d say access to user data is a liability for Apple.

Apple saw how damaging the iCloud privacy scandal and Cambridge Analytica were. They responded by fully hitching Apple’s brand to the privacy train.

If Apple were to be caught intentionally violating user privacy now, the damage to the brand would be immense.

Apple makes their money primarily by selling cool stuff to people. If they tarnish their brand by violating people’s privacy like Google or Meta, end users have far less incentive to buy Apple’s products.

I work in IT whole life, ie Swiss private banks for more than decade and almost a decade elsewhere. None of the colleagues and friends properly cares about this. You are experiencing HN (or maybe SV) echo chamber effect in 200%.

People I know in category above, and rest as well buy Apple since its premium product, there is a lot of ads on it everywhere, its a lot in media ie Hollywood product placement, they like the design, they like photos it makes, and the price you have to pay makes you stand out as non-cheapskate in same vein cool fresh haircut or expensive clothing/jewelry does. Privacy isn't in top 10, ever.

Scandals? What scandals? In current world they come and go, people have little attention span with covid, wars, environmental crises and so on. That goes for Android too, people en masse simply don't care about phone privacy. Makes me a bit sad but it is what it is.

Apple has indeed less incentives than Google [0]. But a third alternative also exists (see my other comment).

[0] https://www.barrons.com/articles/apples-advertising-business...

Apple want to vastly increase the amount of money they make from ads - that blurs the line somewhat, no?

What is the source for this claim? I haven't heard anything to this effect and nothing I've seem from Apple signals anything along these lines.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/report-apple-tested-ads-in...

There are MANY stories about their push into ads to augment their other newer services money streams. That's just one.

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