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Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

Obviously the case even without Mysk’s research. Apple’s vision for the future is the walled garden of tech utopia. It makes sense that they want data to retain users and lock them in further to the brand. It’s so devilishly hypocritical to track users and pass it off as normal business practice when they have clearly positioned themselves as the defenders of user privacy against the likes of Alphabet and Meta. Alas, I’m typing this in an iPhone because I don’t know of another viable option for now.

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The distinction is that Apple doesn't monetise your data by sharing it with third party companies.

Personally I'm fine with a company I choose to do business with storing information about me and about how I interact with their services. It just seems obvious that they will need to do this in order to provide their services. I understand that some of this info may be more than the strictly necessary minimum, but I have no evidence so far that any of this info has been used for purposes I consider nefarious. If they do, ok I'll reconsider.

I do understand the argument that they're providing an option to opt out of tracking, and that some of this data appears to be what is reasonably considered tracking info. That's a potential concern, sure, but again are they actually using this for anything I'd consider nefarious? If so then again I'm interested, but if not then ok, they should stop doing it, but that's as far as my interest goes.

Using the data to target ads is as good as sharing it with third party companies. Apple is monetizing you, ostensibly at some point they can just stop making products and survive by advertisers paying to advertise on Apple devices with perfect accuracy given the data Apple has on all of us.

I think you're misunderstanding what this is. They only use it to target ads in their store, they still need to actually sell you stuff or they get nothing. You may be thinking of what Microsoft does, getting paid to put ads in their products like Windows, but Apple isn't doing that. If they do, I'll worry about it then.

They already tried it with iAds, what makes you think they're not going to do it again?

Apple is forced to share the data with the federal police and other agents of the state, oftentimes (30k+ per year) without a search warrant.

If you think it’s not a risk because they don’t sell it to advertisers, think of all of this lifestyle data, times a billion people, being used nefariously to undermine human rights by someone worse than whoever you think the most repugnant US president has been.

The collection of the data is the problem, because there is a player in the game who is not Apple but has 100% access to all data that Apple has.

If it were the FBI collecting all this dragnet data in bulk, would you be concerned or alarmed?

Is there any evidence of tracking data being used this way, any prosecutions of criminals based on it?

Prosecution is not the threat. Extortion/blackmail or other sort of manipulation is. By their nature such activities would not be known to the public.

Google Pixel + GrapheneOS is an excellent alternative to an iPhone in terms of usability, privacy, and security, and hardware + software longevity.

I know it seems weird to recommend a Google phone, but one can completely eschew the issues around Google tracking, by not using Google services, or using them within the on-device sandbox giving them standard privileges.

> Alas, I’m typing this in an iPhone because I don’t know of another viable option for now.

If you want to support the fight for freedom and free yourself from both Google and Apple, consider a GNU/Linux phone, Librem 5 or Pinephone.

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