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by ASalazarMX 132 days ago
If Apple really walked the walk about their privacy marketing, it would sunset all their APIs used for tracking, making impractically hard for advertisers to track you. Not warning "do you still want to be tracked?", but remaking their whole stack to make tracking unreasonably hard.

Currently I see Apple as safer than, say Google or Microsoft, but not as the privacy bastion it claims to be.
1 comments
gruez 132 days ago
>Not warning "do you still want to be tracked?", but remaking their whole stack to make tracking unseasonably hard.

It's opt in, and the bolded option is "ask app not to track", so I'm really not sure what the issue is here.

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ASalazarMX 132 days ago
It's clear it doesn't bother you, but I'll try to explain my posture.

Years ago, Apple's Weather app sourced their data from The Weather Channel. That meant these three tracking options ragasrding your location:

- Always share - You get real-time weather alerts, very useful some seasons

- Share while using - You get current weather, but lose real-time alerts

- Do not share - Might as well uninstall the app

Then Apple made Apple Weather, which collects weather data from multiple sources, and is supposedly safer to share real-time location with since Apple won't share it with anyone. Before this, The Weather Channel had the real-time location of millions worldwide, and all Apple had for privacy was that prompt.

This is the kind of stack reengineering I'm talking about, that makes privacy a real proposal, but applied deeper so it really makes a difference.

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gruez 132 days ago
>- Do not share - Might as well uninstall the app

Unless you're some sort of globetrotter going to a new city every week, the app is quite usable just by adding your city.

>Before this, The Weather Channel had the real-time location of millions worldwide

Are you sure apple wasn't proxying the traffic through their servers?

edit: for instance the stocks app very prominently shows the data is from yahoo stocks, but if you check "most contacted domains" in app privacy report, they're all apple domains. It doesn't contact yahoo at all.

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