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by zepto 1958 days ago
This is bullshit.

1. Apple doesn’t track your activity across other company’s apps and websites.

2. Apple doesn’t require third party apps to request permission to allow personalized ads.

Apple is holding itself to a higher standard than it holds 3rd parties.

1 comments

What’s the proof of that? There are enough probe points for them to gather data. For example, iCloud push notifications must give them some data on your activity in apps that they don’t control. They’ll have some idea of the apps you use and how frequently which is enough behavioral data to do targeted advertising if they wanted to in the future.

Now you may say that some data collection is unavoidable given the nature of the device (eg push messaging) but that’s often also true of other company’s products.

> What’s the proof of that?

I.e. there is no evidence, anywhere that they do this.

I don’t need to prove a negative. If you’re accusing them of something, provide evidence, otherwise this is just innuendo.

Secondly, even if they do have enough data to infer something about user behavior across websites and third party apps in some future in which we discover they were lying, that isn’t the same thing as intentionally tracking people across websites using explicit identifiers today.

It’s worth pointing out that they are aware of the inference problem and we know they sanitize their logs to alleviate it e.g. by anonymizing IP addresses etc before storage, although we also can reasonably guess that they haven’t achieved this universally yet.

> Now you may say that some data collection is unavoidable given the nature of the device (eg push messaging) but that’s often also true of other company’s products.

This is true, but irrelevant.

Apple discloses what they collect, and there is no double standard in what they are asking others to do.

It’s the claim of a double standard that is complete bullshit.

Is there a privacy nutrition label published for how the App Store or Push services use data? How do they use information about what apps I’ve purchased, used, or rated? Or my App Store search queries?
>Shortly after its acquisition of Shazam last year, Apple took the music tagging application ad-free. To follow-up on that change, Apple has now removed nearly all third-party SDKs from the app as well.

Apple has removed the following SDKs from Shazam: AdMob, Bolts, DoubleClick, Facebook Ads, Facebook Analytics, Facebook Login, Inmobi, IAS, Moat, and Mopub.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/02/20/shazam-third-party-sdks/