[igornadj]

I completely agree, and would love to see a competitor to Apple in terms of privacy focus.

I think the reason we don't see it from competitors is that Apple is years ahead of everyone else in terms of customer experience, and privacy is part of that experience, so they focus on it.

You just have to look at how many different models of phones Samsung sell vs how many Apple sell to see how unfocused Apple's biggest competitor is. They will throw anything and everything at the wall to see what sticks. There's no focus on privacy because there's no focus on anything.

[IntelMiner]

>the reason we don't see it from competitors is that Apple is years ahead of everyone else in terms of customer experience

If I might offer a less glowing perspective

Apple is a highly vertically integrated company unlike anybody else in the "top end" of SV. They don't "need" your data

Facebook only exists as a website, so of course they want to data mine you to death, use psychological tricks to keep your eyeballs scrolling their website so they can shovel ads at you

Google effectively gives away Android. They make money by data mining you for advertisements and through providing a wide array of services (Gmail, Maps, Search etc) to augment the things you do on a day to day, in exchange for the reams of data it provides about you

Amazon doesn't really data mine you nearly as much, since their business is more selling you physical goods (or the dominance of AWS, depending on your point of view)

Microsoft wants to chase after what Google and AWS are doing, though their products feel more like pale imitations than anything. Granted that isn't particularly new for them (Zune vs iPod then is Bing vs Google today)

Apple doesn't "need" your data. They have no reason to. They've created products that effectively half of the first world wants to buy through iPhones and iPads

They've spent two decades working to build themselves an outright fortress. They sell you a phone they make, which runs apps from their app store that requires developers to play by their rules

The amount of money Apple makes simply by collecting its 30% revenue cut on everything done on iPhones alone dwarfs what they could get if they even attempted to muscle in on Google in the ad revenue business

[pmontra]

To add to your point: Apple uses privacy as a weapon against the other FAANGs. When they add adblock software they reduce the bottom line of their competitors. Less resources for Google and Facebook is eventually more money for Apple.

However the point of GP still stands: people can take advantage of Apple tactics and probably enjoy more privacy by default.

Personally I'm not using Apple devices for a number of reasons and I still believe I'm OK with my privacy because of a number of precautions. Most of them are out of the reach of non tech people, but given that I'm a tech person I can avoid to buy from Apple and still give as little data as possible to Google and Facebook.

[esclerofilo]

There are competitors: The Linux phones (pinephone, librem). In fact, privacy has been one of the selling points of desktop Linux forever. The problem is it doesn't sell, or at least it hasn't till now.

This is what Apple is trying to change, basically convince people (through ads) that they need to care about their privacy, because they know it's a competitive advantage they have when compared to the other big companies.

[wyre]

Privacy was also a selling point of BlackBerry/RIM and was successful but it’s hard enough to convince people it’s worth switching over to Firefox from Chrome so I think you’re right.

It is interesting that Apple can market themselves as protecting our privacy if for no other reason than all their competitors do the bare minimum.