[zmmmmm]

One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing "services" for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can "service" them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts them into conflict with the primary identity they've tried to build up. You can see it already starting:

> divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games

So they're going to spy on their users, huh? Of course, it's perfectly innocent, but they will quickly find that with deeper metrics they can better model what games to fund, etc etc. And before you know it they'll have a tab in their account page just like Google with a list as long as your arm of all the things they know about you.

[blihp]

Take the marketing pitch with a grain of salt. They've been keeping track of aggregate usage data pretty much from the beginning. Also, they already have to keep track of things like which apps/music/movies you have bought for accounting purposes at the very least. For subscriptions they most likely also have to track consumption (i.e. per access data) for royalty/revenue share payments.

I remember a story from the tail end of the Jobs era when they were trying to get their ad network going that their sales force was using as a selling point to advertisers the fact that they had metrics such as how many minutes a day users spent using various apps etc. They just don't share this data outside of Apple and also (according to their public statements) don't access the private data that you create.

[toufka]

I think society is okay with some knowledge about individuals. And that information is valuable. But it's still unclear where the line gets drawn that becomes creepy and inverts its value. If you have the corporate structure and policies to be able to draw an arbitrary line, you're likely better suited to capture long-term value than if you have no line at all and willingly scrape all data just to have it (ie, Facebook/Google).

So, Apple having aggregate data is interesting, because it's certainly a monetization, but if they're truly honest and statistically aggregate numbers, I think that might be a fantastic strategy.

[blackflame7000]

I think the line should be drawn at allowing 3rd parties to search user profiles. I’m content with my content being one of billions on their servers but i’m not ok with my content being indexible for any other reason than what is required for the service to work.

Basically: Select * from AppleDB where userID=Me should never be allowed and failure to prevent such access should result in heavy fines

[ATsch]

I don't think there needs to be a universal line, decided by the company, on what's creepy. I appreciate how GDPR recognizes this. I believe it is up to the users to decide for themselves what they are and are not comfortable with. Just like with some other topics, informed and free consent is really the thing that matters for an act to be okay.

[BillinghamJ]

Aside from accounting purposes, most of these cases are achieved through differential privacy - https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

[zmmmmm]

> They just don't share this data outside of Apple

Google doesn't either. It doesn't stop them getting heat for it.

[GeekyBear]

Back when iAd was a thing, there were articles about how upset advertisers were that Apple's iAd wouldn't let them plug directly into an Apple customer's music and video store purchase history.

>Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users,but what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad.

>rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest, AdAge says. And it’s well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.

>what it doesn’t do is hand over the keys to all that data and let advertisers plug into it directly with their own data-mining and targeting software. That’s not standard for the ad industry and that’s likely the reason a few Madison Avenue feathers are ruffled over their approach.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not-thrilled-w...

I'm not sure why you think that Apple has had a change of heart since then, especially given their recent decision that these sort of privacy protecting policies provide Apple a competitive advantage.

[zerocrates]

I'm not extremely familiar with the ad industry, but isn't this setup (tell us who you want to target and we'll do it for you) the way that the other big platform holders work, like Google and Facebook? That's always been my impression, that the data is their "secret sauce" and they aren't interested in sharing.

[lozenge]

You can upload email addresses and phone numbers to Facebook to target and you can set cookies on your website for retargeting too.

[ENGNR]

I imagine that's only because FB/Google want to protect their distribution, and users run ads directly with them. Smaller publishers have no choice but to give it all up to the ad networks

[api]

This is the most powerful thing they could do. There are a ton of services that are almost impossible to deliver at scale without a lot of data. If only there were a company that was trustworthy...

[millstone]

Apple has sketched out their middle ground here: differential privacy. They're already using this for e.g. QuickType suggestions. However I still agree there is a significant risk here.

[currymj]

they have been quietly hiring a lot of experts in differential privacy. there are various schemes for doing machine learning on populations while hiding information about individuals. it seems likely that this is part of their strategy.

[xbmcuser]

They are taking a few Billion a year from Google for search placement after that any marketing they do about privacy is mostly bull.

[millstone]

This is way too dismissive. Siri and Apple Maps don't know who you are (except on-device) while Google Assistant and GMaps aggressively push you to log in and link your accounts. These real differences aren't erased by choice of search provider.