[shaniamama]

Oh indeed it is. I spent years reading apple reports and my conclusion was that they want the data for themselves so they can sell it. Devices don't make much profit when you factor in how much is spent buying up almost all old devices that hit the market.

[sharkjacobs]

How much does Apple spend buying up old devices?

My impression was that Apple did trade ins to acquire stock to refurbish and resell in India, and to incentivize users to upgrade.

I would be pretty surprised to learn they were losing money on trade ins, and I've never heard of any kind of direct buy back.

[saagarjha]

> I spent years reading apple reports

Which ones?

[p1necone]

Do you have any evidence of Apple selling user data?

[slivanes]

It's right in Apple's privacy policy, see Disclosure to Third Parties section: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

They obviously sell user data in aggregate - not at a personal level, but which of the big tech companies sell personal data (maybe FB / Cambridge Analytica?)

Also, Apple has Google as the default search engine which Google pays billions for. Is that selling your personal data?

[p1necone]

You mean the disclosure to third parties section that explicitly says "Apple does not sell personal information"?

I can't see anything in that section that says that they sell information to third parties, personally identifiable or aggregate (I would consider the latter to be "personal" data as well fwiw). Is there a specific sentence you're thinking of?

It seems to be talking about the necessary sharing of data that happens when Apple contracts with third party services to run their own business. E.g. when they ship you a product they need to provide your address to the courier company. Or when they pay an advertising company to run ads for Apple products targeting certain markets/their own existing customers (not the same thing as selling personal data to an advertiser so that they can run ads for other products using said data - that would be selling personal data)

As far as I can tell you're either using a definition of "sell" that is different to mine, or you're claiming Apple is using weaselly language to make it sound like they don't when they do (which is not unheard of of course). But you haven't provided enough information for me to really know what you're talking about - which is it, and why?

Also no, making the default search engine google is not selling personal data.

[slivanes]

They target ads to your interests, default on:

"Ads that are delivered by Apple’s advertising platform may appear in Apple News and in the App Store. If you do not wish to receive ads targeted to your interests from Apple's advertising platform, you can choose to enable Limit Ad Tracking, which will opt your Apple ID out of receiving such ads regardless of what device you are using. If you enable Limit Ad Tracking on your mobile device, third-party apps cannot use the Advertising Identifier, a non-personal device identifier, to serve you targeted ads. You may still see ads in the App Store or News based on context like your search query or the channel you are reading. In third-party apps, you may see ads based on other information."

[p1necone]

A third party being able to list ads on apples ad platform that target some collection of desired user data is not the same thing as said third party obtaining user data.

Third parties are buying ad listings, not user data. They have no way to extract user data from the ad platform, unless there's some kind of data leak.

If you think Apple is harvesting data off of bought back phones to improve their ad targeting that would also be a scandal (that I would expect some evidence of - otherwise it's just baseless speculation), but referring to it as "selling user data" is just obscuring what you're actually trying to communicate.

[zelphirkalt]

Unless those ads contain anything, that is loaded from the ad creating company, whichis then loaded in the user browser. Of course, no platform would allow requests to a third party …

[spullara]

None of the big tech companies sell user data.

[ipsum2]

Idk if you consider Twitter a big tech company, but they do: https://developer.twitter.com/en/pricing. I don't believe Google or FB does though.

[spullara]

That isn't selling user data. All that is on the site itself, they are just making it easier to access. I'm talking about their click streams and other things that are invisible to the public. That data no one sells because it is how they target their ads.

[ipsum2]

Twitter is literally selling data (tweets) that users generate via API.

[spullara]

The data is public and available to everyone. They are selling an API to it.