It will cause more damage to their brand than $8.5M ... Apple has been positioning themselves as "privacy focused" for years. They're obviously still better than Google in this respect, but it will hurt them more than $8.5M.
Really? Google spies on their users. But everybody knows that.
Apple lies to their users telling them they not spying on them despite doing exactly that.
So who's more dishonest?
(This question is independent from the question whether it's morally OK to spy on people in the first place.)
Are they? Google is probably the most open company about what they collect and how they use it and I've never seen any evidence whatsoever that they ever sell you out ie. do more than simply link you to contextual ads.
All their apps and services also ask for permission pretty explicitly.
Google collects a lot of data but I know they’re not going to sell it, they’re not going to let it leak (probably at least — their security engineering is on another level), and in all of their years, the only thing they’ve done is shown contextual ads or suggestions in extremely mundane places. They’re also such an extremely slow moving ship so it makes them extremely predictable, which is the most critical requirement for trust
It seems like they bend over backwards to be open and precise about their data collection and the risks you incur by accepting it. And gives you tools to view and manage the data (at least some of it).
Meanwhile everyone else is doing similar or worse, while just staying silent -- in Apple's case hypocritically seeming to position itself as a leader of the "privacy" movement, when it really appears to primarily be about Apple's privacy first, then yours (maybe).
But how IS your privacy really better under Apple's control versus Google's? One could argue it's worse under Apple because you're left in a state of not knowing what they're collecting, only reading about violations in court judgments and such. Although it would be prudent in that case to just assume the worst, instead it seems we often prefer not knowing, and living in blissful ignorance.
if the fine was huge, it would be news. but this fine is an amount that's easily ignored, so it will be.
Apple's branding and marketing are too powerful for that to happen. An obscure court ruling matters to people on HN. To the average consumer, it never happened.
You say that, but a non-negligble number of comments here are outright defending Apple saying "just a wrong default setting", "nothingburger", etc.