[stouset]

It’s not an analytic application, its purpose is to benefit users not Apple, and Apple doesn’t actually have any profit incentive to collect user data from this service.

Facebook operates a free service that they use to collect data about you to sell for advertising purposes. Apple sells expensive personal electronics directly to consumers, and has made it a part of their core brand to be privacy-conscious. They’re certainly not perfect, and they’ve clearly made missteps along the way, but they’ve done more than virtually any other public company to further their customers’ privacy and demonstrably collect as little data as possible. When they have made mistakes, they’ve carefully explained what circumstances led to it and have generally gone above and beyond in ensuring that kind of mistake can’t happen again.

Your perspective is little different than the indefensible “both sides” mentality many people have toward politics. Apple is not Facebook, and there is a massive difference to anyone actually paying attention.

[kbenson]

I too, used to think incentives were good enough to generally guard against bad behavior like this. The problem is that incentives can change quickly and unless data is explicitly (and with some guarantee) removed, there's always the chance for it to be accidentally exposed, nefariously exported, or repurposed as incentives change. The only safe amount of data to send out by default is what's essential to accomplish what you are trying to do.

Relying on Apple to do the right thing when they're sent a bunch of data which has some use to them, and to their users, if they keep it and run statistical analysis against it, is like relying on that handshake agreement to store some of your belonging in your kindly old neighbors shed. Sure, you trust him, but he's not going to be around forever, and who's to say what will happen to it if someone takes over his property after he's gone. And if that kind neighbor had a habit of cleaning up the stuff your kids left in your yard for you by putting the items in that shed of his... well it's nice that he allows your kids to get their stuff from there whenever they want, but still, that's just asking for problems down the line.

[stouset]

> Relying on Apple to do the right thing when they're sent a bunch of data which has some use to them, and to their users, if they keep it and run statistical analysis against it, is like relying on that handshake agreement to store some of your belonging in your kindly old neighbors shed.

No, it's relying on this being disaligned with their profit incentives. They've made a selling point of their products being privacy-focused, and actions that go against that directly impact the profitability of these products.

There have been several cases where data was mistakenly collected. Nobody's perfect! And in every one of those cases, they've gone above and beyond in explaining what went wrong and how they'll prevent those situations from occurring in the future. In several cases, they've even published white papers pushing forward the current state of the art on preserving privacy while collecting the minimal data necessary for services to function.

Apple is not Google and Facebook. The latter two have direct profit incentive to maximize data collection and analysis of you, personally. Apple wants to sell you consumer devices, and—outside of specific counterexamples like Siri—collecting your data rarely aligns with those profit incentives.