[simonh]

Tracking is about following breadcrumbs across activity in third party apps. So if the Facebook app uses identifiers in common with Uber, and can see what you do in Uber or something, that’s tracking. Recording what you do in a single app, or apps from one company that isn’t strictly necessary for providing the service is telemetry.

Apple doesn’t share user data and identifiers with third parties except as necessary to provide specific services, so it doesn’t track. It does record telemetry though, most of that is in a non personally identifying way, but some of it can be traced to a user.

Obviously identifying information necessary to provide a service is different. If I buy an app off the App Store, they need to identify who bought it. The edge cases are things like, do they need to know I searched for fitness apps on the App Store and associate that with my ID. Amazon does on their web site so they can show ads related to my recent searches, but it’s not strictly necessary for providing the service.

[_heimdall]

Agreed that is the technical distinction made today, but for an end user that really is splitting hairs.

When Apple is offering first-party services that compete with Netflix, Spotify, etc. my privacy concern is that someone is tracking and aggregating data on what I watch and listen to.

As a user I don't really care if that's two separate corporations sharing unique identifiers or two departments in the same umbrella corporation, it's still a privacy concern.

[simonh]

You don't think who the data is shared with, whether or not you know or consent to it, and how it is propagated is a significant factor in privacy concerns?

[_heimdall]

Of course that's a significant factor, but that wasn't my point. I care if Apple Music and Apple TV aggregate my data just as much as if Spotify and Netflix do it.

This isn't anything new, we've known that Apple does this for years. If data sharing is within one umbrella corporation it's technically easier to subpeona and investigate, but that also means they have that much larger of a pile of cash to defend themselves with.

Consider another aggregious Apple policy, mobile browsers. They have had a much more oppressive browser policy than Microsoft ever did and they have done this openly since iOS 2 when the app store first launched. They've never been held accountable though - they get away with it even though Gates was dragged in front of Congress multiple times for simply shipping his OS with a pre-installed browser. Why? And if that obvious issue goes unpunished why should I expect anything better with regards to their data collection practices, simply because one parent Corp is owning all the data?

[smoldesu]

Not if we can't hold Apple accountable for that information, no.

[simonh]

That’s exactly the point. We can hold Apple accountable. That’s what’s happening with these investigations of what data they are holding and how it’s used. If the data was shared far and wide that would be difficult or even impossible.