How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
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Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#2The title of this article is click-bait, surely? Apple have made much PR out of their privacy stance. Indeed, the article says: "Apple makes a big deal about its different approach to privacy on the company website".
How is this eye opening?
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#3I find that comforting. In fact, if I was a large organization and processed a ton of user data, I'd want to store that data anonymously too, due to the sheer risk of having that personal data.
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#4I always question the effectiveness of obfuscating data using "unique identifiers" against a party determined to de-obfuscate the data. Aside from that, however, this is an encouraging read.
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#5The title of this article is click-bait, surely? Apple have made much PR out of their privacy stance. Indeed, the article says: "Apple makes a big deal about its different approach to privacy on the company website". How is this eye opening?
Perhaps because we've all been conditioned to ignore PR, or to believe the exact opposite of what PR says. Seeing that it's true is an unexpected situation.
It's also eye opening in the context of a comparison against the other FAANG companies in question.
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#6The title of this article is click-bait, surely? Apple have made much PR out of their privacy stance. Indeed, the article says: "Apple makes a big deal about its different approach to privacy on the company website". How is this eye opening?
The eye opening part was how little data there was and the hoops needed to verify the recipient. This is in comparison to Google and Facebook. Both have orders of magnitude more data and sent the data with, apparently, little verification.
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#7Just pointing out the obvious: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The only eyeopening part would be the fact, that Apple doesn't store much about it's users, which isn't verifiable.
Also unique identifiers are not the only way to link data. And due to differential privacy the guarantees that the data cannot be linked decays over time (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15224312)
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#8Just pointing out the obvious: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The only eyeopening part would be the fact, that Apple doesn't store much about it's users, which isn't verifiable. Also unique identifiers are not the only way to link data. And due to differential privacy the guarantees that the data cannot be linked decays over time (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15224312 )
The question is motive. Apple's business model isn't predicated on having a lot of data on you. They have to keep a list of your purchase history for instance so you can redownload purchases.
Also, why would they risk lying? What's in it for them?
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#9Did we really need a photo of the author holding a prinout of the data?
> It kept a copy of every app and song I'd downloaded, every tune I'd added to my iTunes music library, and every time I needed repair on a multitude of Apple devices going back a decade.
Is this surprising in any way? If you buy something (or "buy" it for free on the App Store) of course the company you buy it from keeps records of that.
Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me
#10To be fair, MB of data is kinda a crummy metric because for Facebook that's primarily photos and videos