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Apple Hit With Class Action Alleging It Tracks Users Despite Privacy Assurances
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I can't tell you to what end Apple collects data, but communication with Apple's servers (System Services) is the single largest monthly consumer of my phone's cellular data, to the tune of about 500 MB a month. It consistently dwarfs the next largest user of monthly cellular data, Safari. Drilling deeper, within System Services the largest consumers in decreasing order are Security Services, Messaging Services, DNS Services, iTunes Media Services, and iTunes Accounts (and I only listen to locally stored music, by the way).
And that justifies Apple in storing your data ? In other words, you'd be okay with the government watching and recording your every step, as long as they don't share/sell it ?
Interesting logic!
Well it does. Every apply for a TSAPRE? Interact with the IRS? Apply for a passport, credit card or drivers license? Make a phone call? The difference is when the government does it, it goes into a black hole that can't be quantified and covers every aspect of your life. When Apple does it, my only worry is they'll put up an ad in the app store.
So is yours!
Another litigation. Doesn't seem to end for Apple. When it comes to privacy, Apple does more than most of the other companies.
For most if not all big corps the litigation is never ending. The difference here is items like this make for clickable headlines.
Your quote said, "entire life history", I'm looking for something pretty substantial to bear out the hyperbole.
Meta to Pay $37.5M to Settle Facebook Location Tracking Suit
The deal covers 70 million U.S. users and follows a $90 million deal earlier this year to resolve another privacy lawsuit.www.hollywoodreporter.com
Meta settles lawsuit for 'significant' sum against businesses scraping Facebook and Instagram data | TechCrunch
BrandTotal and Unimania agreed to an injunction banning them from scraping Facebook and Instagram data going forward or profiting from data they collected.techcrunch.com
Meta says it won't collect user data 'in new ways' - 9to5Mac
Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has rewritten its Terms of Service and, as a result, has also...9to5mac.com
Take your pick. Meta collects / sells data
Ironic don't you think that both Apple and their fans/supporters take the piss out of Samsung and Intel for their adverts on how good they are compared to Apple and Apple have taken the piss out of Google and Meta (formerly facebook) due to those companies privacy flaws and tracking of it's users and low and behold, a little known company called Mysk has evidence that Apple is doing things just as bad as Google and Meta when it comes to privacy and tracking.
Exactly they consider their gathered data so valuable that they sit on it, process it, nourish it, polish it and sometimes even vomit it. But you can buy certain let's say results of all that. If these results have any connection with reality seems to be unimportant, even for the one that buys them it seems. As long as they bring in some money.
And you are right they would be incredibly crazy to sell the original data. Because then someone might find that some of the results, or maybe all, are useless for the very thing they are sold for. And that much is based upon assumptions turned into virtual-reality.
But be aware that some apps and trackers do send their data straight to some organisation. I was stunned when I learned that a muslim-prayer app was sending all its data to one company. And that all the data received by that company was bought by the Pentagon. The company that owned the app may even have been set up by .... well you can guess.
Still we should keep out heads together and not end up into speculation about what, and what not, is sold and to which extend it can harm. We had this scandal about all the information that western government's scratched together. And the very whistle blower that revealed it all, recently got citizenship of one of the most humane and civilised countries in the world. A country where two days ago someone critical of its government was kidnaped and literally killed with a sledge hammer. The whistle blower received his passport by Putin himself.
Which made me think about how his story came to life. And if that democratic president of that great republic, where people can vote if they want to be part of it, was also involved. He just had to stir it up a little; for better effect.
I like how the article can’t specifically say which Apple app is doing it and that the data is encrypted, like all data from your phone, so therefore its definitely personal information and everything else they listed. They only claim the phone is doing it. They couldn’t even prove it. At the moment this is really just a smear tact. Don’t have a problem with them looking into this but I doubt it will be anything close to what the researcher’s claim.
I’ve read Snowdens book, and he claims in the epilogue that one of the key changes that came about as a result of his revelations was that big tech companies started encrypting their data by default - to stop government data collection at that scale.
Now, whatever you believe, I doubt these companies are willingly providing the government with their user data. They are certainly not selling it to monied third parties, which was the original bones of this discussion.
Personally I don’t think Apple are significantly better than the other companies, but I view them as the best of a set of bad choices. My concern stems more from the direction the company seem to be headed with its greater focus on advertising (which necessitates greater levels of data collection).
It’s not the data collection that bothers me. It’s who gets to see it and how is it used apart from delivering me ads I will never have an interest in.
Well this will be interesting.
If Apple settles out of court it’ll be heavily viewed, at least in the media, as an admission of guilt. Also users will take this pretty negative.
I don't believe anything. I just know that it is not the big tech firms that knowingly breach your privacy, that are most dangerous. It's often the app's themselves and their 'owners/developers' that gather information. And relay it through a set of intermediaries, to obscure their traces. And the greatest danger lures in apps with security issues that are discovered accidentally. Some are well known in the developer world. Dating apps that can be breached for instance.
Encryption is nice but the vulnerable data are most of all the meta data. And they are hard to encrypt. A telephone number, e-mail addresses that sort of thing. Encryption was already an issue before this Snowdon figure. If he makes those claims then he makes himself more important than he is.
As for this Snowdon figure, you simply have to ask yourself why, if he is so opposed to data being snatched, he started to live in Russia. He either is a complete idiot played by the Russian FSB or, in full knowledge of what he was doing played along with them.
I personally don't trust people that say they don't want government control and then go to live in Russia.
You should really read up on what happened and how he got originally stuck in Russia and what happens if he leaves.
hint: Espionage Act
That depends wildly on the privacy laws in your region. In the EU for example GDPR and to a lesser degree the upcoming Digital Services Act, aim to police data collection. However bad actors will always exist and on the internet it’s all but impossible to truly protect your data.
I would argue the greater danger stems from the OS rather than individual applications however. Any good OS will sandbox and limit important access to third party applications, but as this news story potentially demonstrates Apple have no such restrictions and with the OS being closed source you just have to trust them.
Which is what modem computing essentially comes down to - you can’t even fully verify open source apps (whose to say the verifiable source code on Git is actually the code you just downloaded from the App Store, for example).
You just have to trust the code on your device stems from a non malicious source.
As an aside, the data types you raise (phone number, email) aren’t really meta data, they’re IDs, and probably the least important pieces of data possible given they’re identifiers most people happily hand out without concern.
I could go on and on, but this is straying dangerously off-topic.
Again off-topic & I don’t want to get into politics here, so I’ll just urge you to perform some further research on Edward Snowden, he’s probably the single greatest figurehead for digital privacy and extremely inspirational. His book is very good.
Well before this Snowdon figure went to Russia, I went to Transnistria. Officially part of the Republic of Moldova, but because Mr. Putin wanted to rescue the Russians living there, who by the way just declared themselves independent of Moldova, the dear president of the democratic republic sent his troops in 1992. To occupy one small part of a very small country that also is one of the poorest countries of the world.
So the Russians occupied Transnistria, where there used to be the largest armour storage of the former Soviet Union. And when I say large, I mean large. A Colonel of the OVSC calculated that when every week two 50 carriage trains would leave from Tiraspol direction Moscow it would take over 50 years to transport it all back. So the Russians decided it was easier to let it be there. They would need in in the future. And yes that was recently 30 years later. The great President planned ahead! You saw all the rusty guns served to all the new Russian soldiers? Well I bet you, the guns and the rust came from Transnistria.
But could this Snowdon figure not have figured out how bad Russia was before going there? Well he could have called me....
I went to Transnistria under very DANGEROUS conditions. A country not recognised by any other country in the world and where they had, according to their most glorious leaders, no HIV and no AIDS. And because of that the people in Transnistria, occupied by the Glorious Russian Army in all its rusty splendour, did not have condoms. The really did not need them.
So I went with as much condoms as I could find and a Russian-Moldovan friend to Transnistria. There we were considered CIA-agents. That's also why we went there. Some people of the condom smuggle organisation had been arrested before. This happened when they got condoms from an American help organisation. They were accused to be American Agents. Seeding Western ideas. Knowing all of this we decided that we would still smuggle condoms to Transnistria.
To organise this simple feat took quite some organisation. First someone came from Tiraspol in Transnistria to Chisenau in Moldova and told us to go to a bar and then just sit there. We would not speak to anyone, They would recognise us. Then they would know that we were there and had the condoms. Then we would go to a back ally at a certain time the next day. There someone would say something. And then at another place we would meet someone who would then tell were to meet. The condoms we had were free. We just gave them away. Seeding our foreign agents ideas with it.
And now imagine someone in discontent with his government's Big Brother's control habit, seeking refuge in exactly that country that is responsible for the bizar situation that I encountered in Transnistria. And this someone tells you that he had no other option than to go to Russia. Well I would have chosen Transnistria! Seeking refuge in Transnistria seems much more fun to me. Not recognised by any other country so you can't be expelled....
And while this Snowdon figure is celebrating his new home-land, spies of the Glorious Russian Army, snatched a Russian citizen from the streets of Kiev. This guy defected from Russia to the Ukrainian side. And the Glorious Russians took a sledge hammer, a smart-phone and started filming how they literally smashed the head of the defecter into some sort of a brain soup. By which point the Wagner-Group leader, a close friend to Putin and former Putin brain-soup-chef-cook said that a dog should be killed like a dog. Look this up at the BBC website. It is so drastic that it is hard to believe.
Compare this defector to the Snowdon figure. If this figure had some moral or guts, would he really stay there? He knew, like I know what kind of country he went to. And I am only an undercover agent of the condom blues. But if you tell me he can't leave, I would say he can't stay there. His fate when leaving will be much better than becoming a 'Putin's Chef Cook Specialité'.
I wonder if epic will bring this up during its appeal. It could be argued that not allowing sideloading harms user privacy through forcing them to download it through apples tracking riddled appstore.