I still don't understand how Apple not allowing reviews of their own apps hasn't drawn any attention from watchdogs...
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EU Antitrust VP Warns Apple to Give Equal Treatment to All Apps Amid Tracking Changes
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Frankly, this is a WILD tin hat conspiracy theory.
Ummm... Apple has publicly said they don’t. If it ever came out that actually they did & were fabricating all their official statements on their very public webpages describing in detail their privacy policies, they’d be done for.
All it would take is a single disgruntled employee or whistleblower to expose this and literally destroy them as a company. What you’re describing would have to be some crazy scheme at Apple made secret and guarded at all the highest levels.
As bizarre as the conspiracy you claim may exist over there at Apple- certainly nobody would break such an insane amount of laws & take a chance on literally razing one’s own company to the ground for no reason, yeah? I suppose anything is possible for enough money though, right?
Oh wait.... their financials are also public & you can see where all the money comes from. It would be impossible to hide the fact that they were suddenly making the same money they always did, but also the exact same amount as Google or Facebook as well, because they decided to sell info like those guys do.
If you really think companies can just say their money comes from “wherever” & not prove it- why doesn’t FB just say all their profit comes from saving kittens from trees & none of it comes from advertising, lol? And if we can agree that Apple does NOT make profit off data tracking- produce another motive... or your supposition is entirely impotent.
Instead of “warning” Apple when they’ve already stated why they don’t need the pop ups in their own apps, the EU should be busy trying to get other companies to follow suit. They would finally be doing something useful instead of getting involved in issues they don’t understand.
True, though with so much content being encrypted en-route, you'll get mostly traffic analysis, rather than a peek at what is being sent. Still, if the site being contacted is, say, "tracking.facebootk.com", or "nefarious.apple.com", that could raise an eyebrow.
Maybe they were talking about something different at WWDC a few years back, but I thought I remember them talking about anonymized tracking or something...?
Which I assume would mean that Apple does in fact still track you—I mean, how would their advertising business work if it didn't?—it's just that the data-representation of you (and all the stuff to push ads for) is anonymous; i.e. it isn't associated with ~"SDJim" but instead maybe ~"iUser987r890743"?
But again, I wasn't paying 100% attention at the time and it was years ago so I'm probably completely off.
When face ID came out, apple was bragging about how many times users unlock their iPhones with touch id and how much time would be saved with face iD. That sounds like tracking to me.
And the data is protected and randomized and not sent out of Apple or sold. And you can still turn that off and Apple warns about lost functionality depending on which thing you disable.
The new privacy rules don’t prevent apps from using info they need to run, for example.
Right now Facebook (and other apps), quite illegally in my opinion, mines address books of users after they are uploaded and sells that information, even though the owners of the address books don’t have the right to “allow” Facebook to sell all the third party information inside.
Apple does not do this.
In 2018 a ZDNET reported asked Apple for all the information Apple had on him... it wasn't a lot and nothing that you would consider an invasion of personal information: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-request/
That would probably be because Apple DOES allow reviews of its own products. I don’t know what planet or epoc you exist in but it ain’t here. I just posted a review of Pages without incident.
Tracking anonymoized stats is not the same as tracking PII. IE number of times Face ID used = number of times Face ID used + 1.
Photos or Camera don’t either. You want pop up permissions for those built in core features too?
The EU, as a failed superstate, needs to get off its high horse and stop trying to speak for European countries. It’s in no position to demand anything of Apple
I think it would be ok for an Apple app to prompt you “FYI - we do not track you ...” or something like that, it would provide consistency for sure, and for that matter any app... or am I to assume that because I don’t get a prompt that an app is “safe”?
And to assume that everybody “knows” that Apple doesn’t track is a bad assumption...
And to assume that everybody “knows” that Apple doesn’t track is a bad assumption...
All the non-developer Apple Stans out here saying "Apple doesn't track users!"
They do. Ads served within the App Store, Weather, News, Stocks, and too a MUCH lesser extent are all built around the same device-ID-based audiences they're cutting off from third-party advertisers. The only difference is Apple can "guarantee" its playing by its own rules and only using that data in aggregate.
Not to mention location tracking. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/the-iphone-11-pros-location-data-puzzler/
They do. Ads served within the App Store, Weather, News, Stocks, and too a MUCH lesser extent are all built around the same device-ID-based audiences they're cutting off from third-party advertisers. The only difference is Apple can "guarantee" its playing by its own rules and only using that data in aggregate.
Not to mention location tracking. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/the-iphone-11-pros-location-data-puzzler/
"Every thing must ask for permission to track you, even those things which do not track you." - The Bureaucracy.
The linked article seems to make the devastating discovery that failure to completely turn off location services does in fact mean you failed to completely turn off location services.
It does NOT mean that Apple is using the U1 chip data and selling it to Russian spies.
I am quite okay with apple having a modicum of data to have some type of decent customer experience within Apples' ecosystem. No different than many other vendors who retain customer data so they can give their customers some type of experience, for example car dealers, other manfacturers of consumer electronic devices or major appliance retailers, banks and other financial institutions etc.
What I am not okay with is Apple send my PII out of house to serve up ads or to aggregate customer information in return for $$$ without my consent. I'm not saying they do that.
Android: We track everything. We sell it, too.
Government: OK.
Apple: We’re protecting individual privacy.
Government: We don’t tolerate inequity.
Government: OK.
Apple: We’re protecting individual privacy.
Government: We don’t tolerate inequity.
Or Apple could put up a popup saying, "We don't track our users unlike that company that makes that other operating system."Yes, but for the EU sake, we want something like a comfort popup - it's a pop up just like anything else, just that is does nothing. It's give you nice peace of mind that you can switch it on and off, on and off ... I have total control! WEEEEEE!
None of us really knows what data Apple is collecting. It's opaque for a reason. Probably a lot less than Google, given their incentives as a hardware/software company rather than an ad/cloud company. Either way, the data collection doesn't clearly affect the user, so it's a reasonable strategy to not care.