Shots fired.
(At Google, obviously.)
As a longtime Apple iPhone lover, I switched over to Google Nexus 5 around 6-8 months ago and with it, I decided to try and be as open as possible with my data. This means that I opted into allowing Google to read my mail, save my Chrome searches (and start using Chrome), saving my notes in Google Keep, and then regurgitate all that information back to me on my Google dashboard. I thought to myself: "Once the next iPhone comes, I'll determine if I should go back."
At first, it was striking that one day I booked a flight and then about two weeks later, my dashboard mentioned to me that I should leave 40 minutes early for my flight because of a traffic accident. It knew my flight information, when I should leave, and routes to the airport. I followed Google's suggestion and made it to the airport on time, taking an alternate route Google displayed for me. Once I landed, Google updated my dashboard about the currency exchange, surrounding events, restaurant reviews, foreign news, and more... it "knew" I wasn't home anymore, but across the world. It was initially strange, but with more trips and more experiences, I grew to like that Google could give me handy data.
Another strange thing, when reading my mail, it would point out words like "... On Saturday, Sept. 4...", then ask me if I wanted to save it to my calendar. Small touches like this grew on me and kept my life in sync.
Now, having spent many months with the phone and with the release of iPhone 6, I've come at a crossroads in trying to find out how "okay" I am with giving Google my data. I wonder to myself, "how can Google use this data against me" and come up short. There are things I wish to be private and for those things, they are rare and I use the appropriate channels (Incognito Mode, other email accounts, etc.), but those are much more rare than the typical. It does sometimes bother me that ads show my interests, but other times, I've actually found it surprisingly useful and it has led me to learning about other products available.
I suppose for Apple to release this comment, I agree on the one hand and can see their point, but I wonder... Sometimes it's nice to have certain services available to you, if that means giving some information out.
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.
Air travel is the context of another "overly helpful" issue: The "remind me where I parked" feature doesn't seem to make any attempt to distinguish between modes of transport, with the effect that when I enter the airport terminal after a flight my phone invariably decides that I need to be reminded where "I" parked the plane.
But just wait. Someone will be really freaked out when one Thursday Google fails to show him the traffic to the girlfriend's house, then when he gets there, she breaks up with him.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
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.
This was such a good read until that last word. Including that last word it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and full of confidence in Apple's protection of my data.
A part of me wonders who in the PR department thought this was a good announcement to make and whether he/she still works at Apple.
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
On the other hand, what this also says (to people who like awesome cloud services) is :: "Unfortunately this also means that our predictive keyboard, Siri, and other predictive services will never be that good."
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.
Apparently they will know total aggregate spending through Apple Pay since it's been reported that they get a cut. But that's completely different from, "Hey we noticed you just bought X, why don't you also buy Y, or maybe next time get a better price at store Z"... which is more like the Google approach, and my personal preference is to avoid such 'features' like the plague.
From that point, Apple is completely out of the payment equation. The tokenised data is used to generate a once-off payment authorisation with your bank when you pay for a product using Apple Pay.
But I agree with the point of your post: if Apple thought collecting data would result in a significantly better product, they would probably do it.
It's very hard to maintain an advertising based search business for decades. Just ask Yahoo.
[1] http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-ceo-tim-cook-on...
It might very well be a shot at Google, but it can also be a form of dismissal of an entire segment of the software industry perceived as "less noble" by Apple.