A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy

I don't think this precludes Apple from ever building better predictive services. Tim Cook is specifically saying that Apple does not sell or give away your data to third-parties for advertising purposes. He is NOT saying that Apple would never ask permission to read your e-mail if it meant that they could offer a compelling Apple-created product and user experience as a result.

For example, with Apple Pay, Apple is technically using and storing my private information (my credit card data) to offer me a compelling service. They are not going to then figure out which credit card I own and/or how much I spend, and sell that info to banks so that they can target me with specific credit offers.

I agree that this is useful; but sometimes I think Google tries a bit too hard to be helpful. For a few months, I visited my girlfriend every Thursday evening (and at other times as well, of course, but Thursday evenings were consistent). After we broke up, my phone would helpfully let me know every Thursday evening how long it would take to drive to her apartment.

For instance, it does the content recognition and offers to create calendar events for phrases like "tomorrow", "September 18th", and so forth out of my email. Also, it knows where I live and where I work and tells me how long it'll take to drive back and forth (which isn't helpful to me because I walk), but it also notices when I'm spending the night with my girlfriend because it starts telling me how long it'll take to go to her place.

Perhaps for the level of sophistication Google offers, they need to keep your entire life stored in Google's data centers. But the kinds of features you point out, by and large, are more than possible without it. Your iPhone would know when you have a flight booked, because your boarding pass would be right there in Passbook. It would know when and where you land, because it has GPS. Google might have more clever technology for aggregating and displaying that information, but it doesn't inherently require sending all that data to Google's servers, and the fact that they do so is telling.

Google's latest quarterly website revenue is about US$11B; assuming 500M active users, primitive math gives $88/user/year. Interestingly, that number is right between Google Apps' two paid tiers. However, I'm not sure if adopting paid Google Apps means you've totally escaped the advertising and privacy implications of all of Google's services.

I look at it the other way: What do I gain from allowing Google to build this profile of me, including information from potentially multiple accounts, devices, location history, search history and communication history.

Because if Google is offering their services for free to all comers, that data must be valuable to them. And if I can't deduce why the value is what it is, that's far more likely a failure of understanding on my part than any indication of fairness or harmlessness in the exchange. [1]

And to me, all I see is a convenience function I can't rely upon. It can identify flight or meeting information. Maybe (who knows what parser errors exist or will exist as things change). And it can only even try some of the time, as google doesn't have access to every channel by which my itinerary is set and changed (emails to non-Google accounts, phone calls, text messages, verbal communication, etc.)

And if I can't rely upon it, I have to double-check that it is operating off the right information. And at that point, I might as well have explicitly handled the bits Google Now might have gotten right as well.

The rest of your examples are replaceable with client-side data-detection features -- that have been identifying likely dates, addresses, flights, etc and offering convenience functions to simplify dealing with them for some time -- and location-snapshot information [2]. Nothing there requires indexing all my communications and locations across history.

Maybe Google Now can become something that's worth the trade-off. Or maybe Google will offer a (for-pay?) version with guarantees about who has control over what is retained and who has access to it. But, to me, it's not a good deal right now.

And besides all that, I'm personally a pretty private person, so I have a particularly good imagination of the downside risks, even beyond weighing my benefits vs google's benefits.

[1] It's that old saw: "There's a sucker at every table..." Applied to internet services it suggests: If you can't tell why a company with a free service has a massive valuation and a willingness to pay through the nose for users, you literally have no idea what you're trading away by using it. So you better be damn sure you're at least getting something worth the per-user valuation in return.

[2] Yes, it requires some degree of trust or self-deception to believe that there's a difference between a company that states it's collecting your location history and one that claims it doesn't -- as providing snapshots implies the ability to log said snapshots. But such is life. At some point you make peace with the level of paranoia you can handle, or you opt out of society altogether.

You obviously are of no importance to the world. You do not carry any politically weighted message and you are the crossroads to no important information. The best proof I have: Google and those intermediators of Google have no interest in you.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't participate to the privacy of journalists and members of a political party

It's very hard to maintain an advertising based search business for decades. Just ask Yahoo.

The passcode is “tangled” with the device’s UID, so brute-force attempts must be per-formed on the device under attack

Even with the password you need the device, which they didn't.

You can read about it under File Data Protection in http://images.apple.com/privacy/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Sept....

I read these statements just a Mr. Cook laid them out.

We know they have active programs looking for holes in open source code and fuzzing commercial services looking for vulnerabilities. How is that so hard to believe?

https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...

In a strict sense that's probably not true, they may have to provide some form of bulk data to outside parties for accounting purpose for example. Trying to craft a statement to include those exceptions would just invite more hyper-parsing of the language.

Then again, it's sort of moot because they can probably be legally forced to provide full "access to [their] servers". Some comments here are pointing out they have the choice whether to obey the law, so is Cook actually saying they will disobey it?

Maybe the fact that you received the broadcast should be.

Slowing down anyone who wants to build a massive database about you to identify your weaknesses, this is a good thing to do.

Edit: I love being modded down by people who don't reply with evidence based argument, it's better than fake internet points to let you know you're onto something. /me waves to our visitors from the NSA.

If that list is accurate, that's great.