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by rickdeckard 1355 days ago
> Apple seems to prioritize privacy more than the competition, while for Google collecting, and combing through to monetize, your personal data is a big part of their business model.

It's puzzling to me how this keeps getting repeated without any strong foundation. This story that others sell your data while Apple holds it secure is a narrative established by Apple that keeps coming up like a mantra.

The implication is that Google is gathering personal data to then then sell it to third parties.

But this is not their business model. They profile their customers via their behaviors and personal data, match them to a persona and then sell services to third parties to advertise to users fitting that persona.

I don't see how Apple is doing any less of customer profiling and persona generating than Google. They are both in the business of profiling their users and then monetizing them by offering services to internal/external customers who look for a certain audience.

The core of this is exactly the same between Apple and Google. Neither of them is selling the user-data directly, they both process it in order to package their users into a service they can sell to others.

The main thing that Apple does differently is, that they took stronger measures to ensure that the data THEY collect from their users can only be collected by THEM.

So Apple took action to protect their unique market position of selling ANY kind of goods to users of Apple products, and they claim that they are more honorable to hold and process all your data for financial gain just because (so far) they failed to compete in the advertising industry.

1 comments

>The implication is that Google is gathering personal data to then then sell it to third parties.

No, the implication is that Google collects as much of your personal data as possible, stores it forever, and monetizes it. You can tell because that's what I actually said. What you're responding to is a red herring - you brought up third parties, not me.

If I use the Apple Mail app with default settings from my iCloud account to e-mail ten lawn care services, I won't start seeing web ads for lawn care. If I use Gmail with default settings, I will.

> The main thing that Apple does differently is, that they took stronger measures to ensure that the data THEY collect from their users can only be collected by THEM.

No, the main thing that Apple does differently is make their money by selling hardware, software, and services directly to end users. This is in stark contrast to Google, whose typical business model offers free services that make the end users into the saleable product.

> If I use the Apple Mail app with default settings from my iCloud account to e-mail ten lawn care services, I won't start seeing web ads for lawn care. If I use Gmail with default settings, I will.

That's because Apple doesn't operate ad-services on scale at this point, particularly not on the web. The fact that they are scanning each and every email was made clear when they announced their CSAM scanner you also mentioned. I strongly doubt that Apple operates a crime-fighting division and that is the only purpose of scanning content. It's much more likely that they already analyze messages and content with other ML-models to refine the persona they created of a user.

So yes,they don't show you personalized ads on webpages, but without them operating in ads that's not an indicator of privacy. After failing to compete on Ads since 2010, their effort just started to ramp up in the last year.

> No, the main thing that Apple does differently is make their money by selling hardware, software, and services directly to end users.

Agreed, but Hardware is a segment that is close to saturation, and the majority of SW R&D resources are spent on the OS which is provided free of charge when purchasing the Hardware. Their growth-strategy is quite obviously based on services, with the strongest-growing of them being platforms of consumption (Appstore, Music, TV,...) and platforms of data-aggregation (Cloud, Pay, Card, CarPlay, Homekit,...).

Those consumption platforms serve content of third parties competing with each other for the user, and as the platform provider Apple offers those sellers paid services to reach the user.

I am fine to disagree, but in the growing world of services which are about to reach 25% of Apple's revenue soon, the Apple user who created the hardware revenue is the product being sold by Apple. To App-Developers, Music publishers, Movie Studios, Mobile carriers,...