They are for sure. It's like if you fart and instead of owning up to your smelly fart you say, "Ewww. Who farted?" Or, you blame the fart on another person (in this case, Google) to distract people from identifying you as the smelly farter.
Yeah, you're probably right. I won't quit my day job. I saw farting as the collection of user data described in the article and thought the analogy was kind of funny.
I think that if they are collecting user data it's only due to Government pressure.
I can't imagine any business related reason that would require Apple to store and harvest user data. When you make such a large profit on hardware, you don't need to scrounge around for bits and bytes to sell to the advertisers.
Of course this excludes the minimum data they need to maintain warranties and your payment details.
They've got your iMessage/Facetime chat logs, they've got your stored unencrypted data in iCloud, they've got the apps that you're using and probably their settings or saved meta-data as well. Speaking of iCloud, they've got your contacts as well. Your iPhone is collecting your location and the Wifi networks around it and sending it to Apple's servers. At some point the iPhone was saving your location history in a local file as well, ready to be inspected by whomever got a hold of it. The operating system is completely closed / proprietary, so if it has back-doors in it, nobody will ever know.
I'm glad that Tim Cook is raising these issues and I realize that behind every piece of data they have there's a justification for it. But in our country we have a saying which applies here: he ate no onions and his mouth stinks not.
Both of those services are encrypted so what useful data would they have on it?
I think Tim Cook's point is that they collect data solely to improve your user experience. If they stopped tomorrow they would continue making money. Other companies collect data they need for user experience plus data advertisers will find valuable so they can sell it/exploit it. If they stopped collecting data tomorrow they would die unless they radically changed their business model.
That is correct, iMessage is encrypted, however they still have your metadata (who you're speaking with, timestamps) and because of how iMessage works (asymmetric cryptography with multiple public keys managed by Apple), it's easy on Apple's side to attach a new public key and device to your account such that anybody can then listen to the messages sent to you. And so, because you can't settle on a specific public key with the person you're talking with, the model is kind of broken, although it is better than nothing.
XMPP / OTR is a much better option for encrypted chats. It's fairly user friendly as well. Unfortunately big companies owning chat services are not fans of open standards.
But this is kind of like your phone company having complete access to all of your phone records. It's necessary for their business, but they gain nothing from investigating them, just like Apple gains nothing from monitoring who you are speaking with via email when you use an account from them. Or, how a traditional email service provider or ISP from the 90s wouldn't have cared about who you were talking to or what hosts you were communicating with, or what the content of that was.
Google is different, very different than these situations. Everything is read, torn apart, analyzed, and sold. They are organizing the world's information, but they consider your private information some of the most immediately monetizable information.
There really is a huge difference here, and though we all love Google and everything that it has done for us, we must also realize the great amount of power that we have given it over us. Yes, they are benevolent now, but they have much much much more reason than Apple to become less benevolent, and far far more power than Apple does in many respects.
There's no practical reason for a phone company to keep your phone records around, since phone companies are just carriers (although they try pretending that they are not).
Google does have justification for analyzing your activity. They can classify you and improve your search experience. As an example, when I'm searching for "Ruby", I'm getting different results than what my wife does. And local search results are vastly better than anything their competitors are displaying. And then they claim that whatever data they keep around, they are anonymizing it.
Of course, that's probably bullshit, plus they've got access to a huge database of emails. But then we are talking about potential and pretending that Apple does not have potential to do harm, or that it has less incentive than Google, well I don't buy that.
I should mention that at some point I worked on a system that was integrating with Google AdX, which is the platform that is supposedly selling the information you're talking about to advertisers. I must say that compared to other RTB platforms, they actually expose less information. You don't get a reliable user ID, you don't get an IP and they reject your application if you're setting cookies. It's very hard for advertisers that use AdX to build profiles.
I don't think the problem is so much collecting data, more what agreement the company collecting the data has with third party corporations and governments. Also, the fact that Apple includes full disk encryption for OS X, and encrypts all communications on iOS storage and in transit with personal keys, is a pretty good sign Apple is taking personal privacy seriously.
All the encryption in the world doesn't make any difference if it's easy to steal your account.
Unlike Facebook or Google, Apple practically had to be shamed into fixing an easily-gamed account reset process and adding two-factor authentication support (and then took their own sweet time rolling it out across their services) and had to be shamed again into adding rate-limiting on logins. Not to mention their spotty track record on other security issues (e.g."goto fail").
That doesn't mean that Apple hasn't done some things that are good for personal privacy. But their broader track record makes it clear that Apple only takes the appearance of personal privacy seriously. The reality, on the other hand, easily takes a back seat to things like UI simplicity unless that missing reality starts creating appearance problems.
Everyone is collecting user data for targeting and segmentation in marketing. Not sure Tim Cook knows everything that is going on at Apple. I've worked directly with several CEOs of larger companies and none new everything that was going on.
Apple tend to put a lot of polish on things and an Apple mandated key service which can provide an authoritative list of who is trusted and such would be a big push to pgp everywhere.
not to mention the "click once, you can now sign your emails" UX would be lovely to have.
And with the icloud accounts system you have a method of having some (although minor) trust that the person making the private keys, is, who they say they are.
it would be very easy for apple to have a fully integrated pgp solution. :D
My problem with this is that it is pure marketing play. Apple isn't doing anything really great to enhance user privacy in absolutes - all they are doing is having all your data and not letting anyone else benefit from it - right now. Which is to say Apple still does benefit from your data in direct or indirect ways.
They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X. And Apple supporters' justification for that is well, Apple isn't a company whose revenue and profits are mostly dependent on ads. But if you look at facts, Apple wants to get a big pie of everything, not just hardware. And they go out of their way to try and get it - book sales (ref: antitrust case), iAd, Maps, Streaming Music - the list goes on and on.
Given this, how do you claim Apple won't use your recorded search queries or music you listened to (Genius Recommendations) or location data or whatever else they record and we don't yet know about - to increase their profits? They sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first place.
Google is doing the same thing by showing you ads that may be of interest to you, analyzing your Google Voicemails to increase their speech recognition accuracy, making their maps data more robust by giving you the best Navigation app for free, giving you useful reminders by looking at your email - they are doing it now and in return they are providing you with great products you can optionally use.
To claim that Google is doing something evil while Apple is not purely because they make money on hardware is naive and too simplistic. (Case in point - Microsoft made most of their money selling you boxed software - now a days they want you to use their services and will provide you with a free upgrade to Windows and free online Office suite down the line. They did not care about your data before, but now they do!)
Fact is you can either place reasonable trust on Google or Apple and continue to be part of the modern world or just drop all your devices, bank accounts, cards, get a car from 1970s and move off the grid. As much as it sounds harsh there isn't really such a thing as 100% privacy. Your data will always be vulnerable to becoming public in various degrees and to various effects.
>> "Apple isn't doing anything really great to enhance user privacy in absolutes - all they are doing is having all your data and not letting anyone else benefit from it - right now."
1. iMessage and FaceTime data is encrypted.
2. Having my data and not letting anyone else benefit from it is 100x better than what most tech companies are doing. Also they don't have 'all' my data. They take what they need to improve my experience. Other companies hoover up everything they can because they need it to sell.
>> "They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X."
To improve the spotlight user experience. They're not selling my data and I can easily disable it.
>> "They sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first place."
No. The data the collect is to improve the user experience. They have no need to sell it - they're the biggest company on the planet.
>> "As much as it sounds harsh there isn't really such a thing as 100% privacy."
There never has been but there is a big difference between what Apple offers privacy wise and what Google or Facebook offer.
That doesn't really mean anything though. Apple still can decrypt your iMessage data. Besides you don't actually know - you are trusting Apple when they say they can't decrypt your messages. Given law enforcement situation that is most certainly false.
>2. Having my data and not letting anyone else benefit from it is 100x better than what most tech companies are doing. Also they don't have 'all' my data. They take what they need to improve my experience. Other companies hoover up everything they can because they need it to sell.
But Google isn't selling your data to anyone else either - the only parties benefiting from it are Google and you. Where is the proof that Google is selling your data to 3rd parties? Likewise you can give Google the data you feel like giving - no one is forcing anything on you.
>> "They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X."
>To improve the spotlight user experience. They're not selling my data and I can easily disable it.
This is getting tiring - how is this any different from what Google does? You seem to implying that because Apple makes money from hardware today they won't sell my data tomorrow. I gave specific examples on how that is not true and how that could not be true tomorrow. Problem is you are starting with a blind faith in Apple - once you do that everything starts to sound logical even without any facts to support! If you drop blind faith in either Apple or Google you'll see that it is all the same - Google isn't selling your data to 3rd parties as much as you would love to believe. They are just benefiting from it. And that _could_ change tomorrow. Same with Apple.
>> "You seem to implying that because Apple makes money from hardware today they won't sell my data tomorrow."
I'm not implying that. If they did decide to that tomorrow (which would be an incredibly stupid business decision) they would have much less data on me to sell than Google does one of their users simply because they aren't collecting EVERYTHING, only what they need now.
> they would have much less data on me to sell than Google does one of their users simply because they aren't collecting EVERYTHING, only what they need now.
Bold claim without supporting facts. They know what you are searching for (yes, yes only to improve your experience, but still), they have your credit card, if you use Apple Pay they know what you are buying and where, they can totally read your iCloud email, photos etc, they can track you at their stores using the bluetooth beacons or whatever, they know what music you search for and buy etc.
What does Google know about you that Apple cannot if you are a hard core Apple ecosystem user? What can you stop Google from knowing about you if you are a Google user? If you add up everything - it's all the same!
It's a clever pivot by Tim Cook. He figured out that Apple is awful at selling advertising and has turned this into a marketing feature.
Steve Jobs was very excited about advertising, remember him describing iAds as a life changing experience that users would love? It completely failed, but hey.
It is true that it is failed, and that video looks silly in retrospect. But it's also true that Apple has always had an entirely different business model than, say, Google. This isn't a new "marketing feature." Apple has never sought to make large sums of money by selling user data.
Repeating a lie that Google sells user data doesn't make it right. Stop getting brainwashed by Apple and learn facts and learn how Google makes money. It doesn't sell your personal data.
This would have sounded credible if Apple didn't have an iAds business that mines user clicks and offers retargetting ads to paying customers.
Instead, now, this sounds like Microsoft's Scroogle campaign, where it accused Google of doing all the things that Bing also did, but wasn't successful at doing.
"One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether."
In reality using Apple products reduces your privacy. How ?
If you use Google's products(and who doesn't use Google Search ? ) , Google already knows plenty about you. And even if you don't use Google products, Google knows plenty about you, since it's tracking software is installed in large percentage of sites, etc.
And if you add machine learning on top of that , the amount that Google knows about you is great - even if you use Apple's products.
In reality, by using Apple's products, you don't gain privacy , you lose privacy - now two companies know a lot about you, instead of one.
Also this exposes your data for security bugs from both companies - thus making it easier for third parties to go at it.
Really? All your documents, finances, photos, music, movies, messages, health data, viewing patterns - might as well just give that to Google since they already have your search queries? That doesn't make any sense.
You underestimate the amount of intelligence Google's search data + smart machine learning can deduce about you. Remember how in the sherlock holmes stories, sherlock can deduce huge amount about people , from tiny clues ?
How much do you think sherlock could deduce from Google searches - where people usually bare their souls ,on ALL their issues, from the insignificant to the critical?
Machine learning can, to some extent , be that sherlock, but if someone with the right investigantional skills diggs through your search data - he can be sherlock too.
And since Google does know all that about you, in most cases ,i think that keeping the rest of the data won't be the thing that "saves" you - maybe with the exception of your browsing patterns - but since Google has trackers in most web sites - they already know a large part of your browsing patterns - so you're quite defenseless there.
TL;DR - Google search knows a huge amount about you, And with that data, sherlock holmes(or a decent investigator, or probably an AI) can know almost everything on you!
Fortunately any company that sits on information about you can sell it to third parties, and has little incentive to not do so, meaning you won't be restricted to just one company sitting on your privacy.
As far as i understand Google's business model doesn't really sells your data. It's an interesting question though how much of your data does leak to third parties via Google's ads etc,in a way that hurts your personal privacy. But i think Google's interests is that none of that leaks so they'll still have that business advantage.
One exception is Google and NSA tracking - but that is mostly a political question as i'm pretty sure the NSA has full access to Apple - it would be naive to think otherwise.
If Apple is serious, the next step will be to open up the source for the encryption parts of iMessage, FaceTime, etc with the ability to verify the binaries, much like PGP used to do for their software. And also to verify the keys being used in the messaging to make sure additional keys aren't being added by apple.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadI can't imagine any business related reason that would require Apple to store and harvest user data. When you make such a large profit on hardware, you don't need to scrounge around for bits and bytes to sell to the advertisers.
Of course this excludes the minimum data they need to maintain warranties and your payment details.
They've got your iMessage/Facetime chat logs, they've got your stored unencrypted data in iCloud, they've got the apps that you're using and probably their settings or saved meta-data as well. Speaking of iCloud, they've got your contacts as well. Your iPhone is collecting your location and the Wifi networks around it and sending it to Apple's servers. At some point the iPhone was saving your location history in a local file as well, ready to be inspected by whomever got a hold of it. The operating system is completely closed / proprietary, so if it has back-doors in it, nobody will ever know.
I'm glad that Tim Cook is raising these issues and I realize that behind every piece of data they have there's a justification for it. But in our country we have a saying which applies here: he ate no onions and his mouth stinks not.
Both of those services are encrypted so what useful data would they have on it?
I think Tim Cook's point is that they collect data solely to improve your user experience. If they stopped tomorrow they would continue making money. Other companies collect data they need for user experience plus data advertisers will find valuable so they can sell it/exploit it. If they stopped collecting data tomorrow they would die unless they radically changed their business model.
XMPP / OTR is a much better option for encrypted chats. It's fairly user friendly as well. Unfortunately big companies owning chat services are not fans of open standards.
Google is different, very different than these situations. Everything is read, torn apart, analyzed, and sold. They are organizing the world's information, but they consider your private information some of the most immediately monetizable information.
There really is a huge difference here, and though we all love Google and everything that it has done for us, we must also realize the great amount of power that we have given it over us. Yes, they are benevolent now, but they have much much much more reason than Apple to become less benevolent, and far far more power than Apple does in many respects.
Google does have justification for analyzing your activity. They can classify you and improve your search experience. As an example, when I'm searching for "Ruby", I'm getting different results than what my wife does. And local search results are vastly better than anything their competitors are displaying. And then they claim that whatever data they keep around, they are anonymizing it.
Of course, that's probably bullshit, plus they've got access to a huge database of emails. But then we are talking about potential and pretending that Apple does not have potential to do harm, or that it has less incentive than Google, well I don't buy that.
I should mention that at some point I worked on a system that was integrating with Google AdX, which is the platform that is supposedly selling the information you're talking about to advertisers. I must say that compared to other RTB platforms, they actually expose less information. You don't get a reliable user ID, you don't get an IP and they reject your application if you're setting cookies. It's very hard for advertisers that use AdX to build profiles.
Facebook and Google haven't made such steps.
Unlike Facebook or Google, Apple practically had to be shamed into fixing an easily-gamed account reset process and adding two-factor authentication support (and then took their own sweet time rolling it out across their services) and had to be shamed again into adding rate-limiting on logins. Not to mention their spotty track record on other security issues (e.g."goto fail").
That doesn't mean that Apple hasn't done some things that are good for personal privacy. But their broader track record makes it clear that Apple only takes the appearance of personal privacy seriously. The reality, on the other hand, easily takes a back seat to things like UI simplicity unless that missing reality starts creating appearance problems.
Apple tend to put a lot of polish on things and an Apple mandated key service which can provide an authoritative list of who is trusted and such would be a big push to pgp everywhere.
not to mention the "click once, you can now sign your emails" UX would be lovely to have.
And with the icloud accounts system you have a method of having some (although minor) trust that the person making the private keys, is, who they say they are.
it would be very easy for apple to have a fully integrated pgp solution. :D
They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X. And Apple supporters' justification for that is well, Apple isn't a company whose revenue and profits are mostly dependent on ads. But if you look at facts, Apple wants to get a big pie of everything, not just hardware. And they go out of their way to try and get it - book sales (ref: antitrust case), iAd, Maps, Streaming Music - the list goes on and on.
Given this, how do you claim Apple won't use your recorded search queries or music you listened to (Genius Recommendations) or location data or whatever else they record and we don't yet know about - to increase their profits? They sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first place.
Google is doing the same thing by showing you ads that may be of interest to you, analyzing your Google Voicemails to increase their speech recognition accuracy, making their maps data more robust by giving you the best Navigation app for free, giving you useful reminders by looking at your email - they are doing it now and in return they are providing you with great products you can optionally use.
To claim that Google is doing something evil while Apple is not purely because they make money on hardware is naive and too simplistic. (Case in point - Microsoft made most of their money selling you boxed software - now a days they want you to use their services and will provide you with a free upgrade to Windows and free online Office suite down the line. They did not care about your data before, but now they do!)
Fact is you can either place reasonable trust on Google or Apple and continue to be part of the modern world or just drop all your devices, bank accounts, cards, get a car from 1970s and move off the grid. As much as it sounds harsh there isn't really such a thing as 100% privacy. Your data will always be vulnerable to becoming public in various degrees and to various effects.
1. iMessage and FaceTime data is encrypted.
2. Having my data and not letting anyone else benefit from it is 100x better than what most tech companies are doing. Also they don't have 'all' my data. They take what they need to improve my experience. Other companies hoover up everything they can because they need it to sell.
>> "They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X."
To improve the spotlight user experience. They're not selling my data and I can easily disable it.
>> "They sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first place."
No. The data the collect is to improve the user experience. They have no need to sell it - they're the biggest company on the planet.
>> "As much as it sounds harsh there isn't really such a thing as 100% privacy."
There never has been but there is a big difference between what Apple offers privacy wise and what Google or Facebook offer.
That doesn't really mean anything though. Apple still can decrypt your iMessage data. Besides you don't actually know - you are trusting Apple when they say they can't decrypt your messages. Given law enforcement situation that is most certainly false.
>2. Having my data and not letting anyone else benefit from it is 100x better than what most tech companies are doing. Also they don't have 'all' my data. They take what they need to improve my experience. Other companies hoover up everything they can because they need it to sell.
But Google isn't selling your data to anyone else either - the only parties benefiting from it are Google and you. Where is the proof that Google is selling your data to 3rd parties? Likewise you can give Google the data you feel like giving - no one is forcing anything on you.
>> "They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X." >To improve the spotlight user experience. They're not selling my data and I can easily disable it.
This is getting tiring - how is this any different from what Google does? You seem to implying that because Apple makes money from hardware today they won't sell my data tomorrow. I gave specific examples on how that is not true and how that could not be true tomorrow. Problem is you are starting with a blind faith in Apple - once you do that everything starts to sound logical even without any facts to support! If you drop blind faith in either Apple or Google you'll see that it is all the same - Google isn't selling your data to 3rd parties as much as you would love to believe. They are just benefiting from it. And that _could_ change tomorrow. Same with Apple.
I'm not implying that. If they did decide to that tomorrow (which would be an incredibly stupid business decision) they would have much less data on me to sell than Google does one of their users simply because they aren't collecting EVERYTHING, only what they need now.
This has boiled down to a "Google collects more data than Apple" argument, which quite frankly is simply unknowable and makes for boring reading.
The fact is, both companies collect data, both companies sell ads, and nothing one CEO or the other says in a speech changes that.
Bold claim without supporting facts. They know what you are searching for (yes, yes only to improve your experience, but still), they have your credit card, if you use Apple Pay they know what you are buying and where, they can totally read your iCloud email, photos etc, they can track you at their stores using the bluetooth beacons or whatever, they know what music you search for and buy etc.
What does Google know about you that Apple cannot if you are a hard core Apple ecosystem user? What can you stop Google from knowing about you if you are a Google user? If you add up everything - it's all the same!
I agree with what you're saying, but this is just not true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_...
Apple is the biggest company on the planet, based on Market Capitalization, which is the factor to determine the strongest companies out there.
If Apple eventually falters goes bankrupt, that data will be worth a lot of money to someone.
Steve Jobs was very excited about advertising, remember him describing iAds as a life changing experience that users would love? It completely failed, but hey.
https://youtu.be/KwVaILbTqS8?t=45m55s
Instead, now, this sounds like Microsoft's Scroogle campaign, where it accused Google of doing all the things that Bing also did, but wasn't successful at doing.
https://www.apple.com/privacy/
http://www.google.com/settings/ads
I remain opted in, fwiw.
I wasn't personally involved in building it, but in my opinion it's really impressive. I wish other companies would do the same.
Pretty easy to say "we don't do this" when it's not even a significant part of your revenue stream.
Sort of like if Zuckerberg said "Our business is based on selling advertising, not on selling premium, high markup shiny things".
If you use Google's products(and who doesn't use Google Search ? ) , Google already knows plenty about you. And even if you don't use Google products, Google knows plenty about you, since it's tracking software is installed in large percentage of sites, etc.
And if you add machine learning on top of that , the amount that Google knows about you is great - even if you use Apple's products.
In reality, by using Apple's products, you don't gain privacy , you lose privacy - now two companies know a lot about you, instead of one.
Also this exposes your data for security bugs from both companies - thus making it easier for third parties to go at it.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/new-remote-exploit-l...
How much do you think sherlock could deduce from Google searches - where people usually bare their souls ,on ALL their issues, from the insignificant to the critical?
Machine learning can, to some extent , be that sherlock, but if someone with the right investigantional skills diggs through your search data - he can be sherlock too.
And since Google does know all that about you, in most cases ,i think that keeping the rest of the data won't be the thing that "saves" you - maybe with the exception of your browsing patterns - but since Google has trackers in most web sites - they already know a large part of your browsing patterns - so you're quite defenseless there.
TL;DR - Google search knows a huge amount about you, And with that data, sherlock holmes(or a decent investigator, or probably an AI) can know almost everything on you!
One exception is Google and NSA tracking - but that is mostly a political question as i'm pretty sure the NSA has full access to Apple - it would be naive to think otherwise.
I think most users are aware of this, and in return for free or low cost products they sign away part of their privacy.
The reason Google Photos offers unlimited storage, Gmail is free etc is they can deep learn the f... out of their users to target their ads better.
Apple's privacy benefit is more of a side effect of their business model than a principle they design their products based on.