| Your coworker gets it :) It’s simply a matter of business models – you don’t even have to like Apple or think they’re lovely people (everyone I’ve met there has been). Google’s business model is to digitise you and own that digital copy. They use this proxy of you to manipulate and exploit your behaviour for profit and to indirectly rent access to aspects of you to their customers (currently, advertisers). Apple’s business model, on the other hand, is to make great tools and sell them to you at a price that makes them happy. (So if you were to buy an Android phone and never use it, Google would be very unhappy. If you buy an Apple phone and never use it, Apple’s still made their profit.) To cut a long story short, privacy is an absolute competitive advantage for Apple. It is a thing that they can compete on without breaking a sweat (as it doesn’t impact their bottom line negatively) whereas, if Google was to try, they would go bankrupt (as their business model depends on profiling you and violating your privacy). All you need to understand to grok why Apple is protecting your privacy is that multibillion-dollar corporations don’t get an absolute competitive advantage over their main rivals everyday and – if you do find one – you’d have to be an absolute idiot to squander it. (And I don’t believe the folks at Apple are idiots.) So yes, Apple’s systems are proprietary and closed, and no, you don’t have to love everything they do, but when it comes to protecting your privacy, all you need to do is trust that under our current system of capitalism, a publicly-traded corporation won’t act against the interests of its bottom line/the interests of their shareholders to squander an absolute competitive advantage against its main rival. (PS. Longer term, I hope that we will radically alter the topology of technology so that we are not reliant on a handful of kings – benevolent or otherwise – to safeguard our rights. That’s what the Internet of People initiative we just launched with DiEM25 in Europe is all about: https://ar.al/notes/towards-an-internet-of-people-with-diem2...) |