Apple is a lot worse then most of their users believe - but even at their worst, they're leagues more privacy focused and less invasive then Google, Facebook and Microsoft are.
But they're still getting worse every year, and the time when they were actually torchbearers for privacy have slowly faded over the years as MBAs have strengthened their hold on the company and Steve Jobs influence waned.
Going back to Apple, their stance on privacy is more geared towards their internal consumption (abuse?) than towards privacy violation-as-a-service for sale. That's not great but I'll take anything I can get.
I know what I'm sharing with Apple is up for grabs by them to use "against" me. And I know the same is true for Google of Facebook, so no real difference here. The problem is the next level, where what I share with someone else is up for grabs by Google or Facebook, or the other way around. This huge web of data collection and sharing is the big problem, not the posts that I'm volunteering to give to FB or the emails I choose to host with Google.
In other words, when you talk to me alone you choose to give me the information, you're aware I will use it in some way to shape my actions. If you tell me your phone broke, I'll offer to sell you my spare, and you won't turn red that I used the info. But if a stranger shows up at your door a minute later to sell you a phone we're suddenly having a different conversation. Same if you go to a pharmacy on the other side of town to buy some medication and the moment you make the payment I send you a text offering my regrets for your illness.
"A lot worse" can mean very different things if you talk in relative or absolute terms, or if you think some practices are just as bad as others.
The problem with ad companies is not that they show ads. But that they are trying to paint a perfect picture of you to sell you stuff. And they are painting that picture by spying on you and your peers.
I hope that you can see the difference between spying on your users and selling that data to advertisers and using telemetry in some product. If you ever worked in software you will know that having telemetry can lead to massive improvements in the product. That said, that data has to be confined to the applicable use case and has to be anonymized.
If you really think there is no difference between ad tracking and telemetry you are right. Apple is a lot worse than people think, but better than Google/Facebook.
But if we are talking just about ads, than Apple is definitely not worse than people think. Because they hardly even have an ad network and when they ask you if you want to be tracked you can just select "No".
You're vastly underestimating the significance of that, as this is personalized too. It's also been shown that you cannot actually opt out of everything, only some things.
At the end of the day, I still consider my Apple devices to be less intrusive then the android and Windows devices I use, but you seem to have an outdated view of Apple's business practices - at least from my perspective
I'm not sure about much worse. It may depend on your own threat model. But here you go:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41184153
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40006508
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
Personally, I don’t think Apple is bad at all relative to Google/Meta and I’m probably technically “wrong” but those links don’t do much to prove it.
> and another flat out says Google is worse
This one I can guess. Google is worse indeed, except they do not advertise themselves as "Android is privacy". This is why Apple is worse.
> Mind you, this is definitionally a conspiracy theory; please don’t let the connotations of that phrase bias you, but please feel free to read this (and everything else on the internet) as critically as you wish.
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
I will admit that this sentence was easy to miss, hidden deeply at the start of the second sentence of the piece.
These links are just all Apple Does A Thing HN Dislikes and I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad.
> I just don’t think any of those things is particularly bad
If it's fine with you that Apple sends info about every file you open on you Mac to their servers, read the corresponding discussion. The comments explain well why it's a serious privacy breach.
Switching to Linux worked for me.
I wonder if everyone's porn habits will one day leak