How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me • Hacker News Board

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#21

Post by icebraining » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

Cenk wrote: post #9

Did 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.

If you buy something of course the company you buy it from keeps records of that.

I don't think it's a problem, but they could not tie it to your identity. After all, when you buy something with cash, the company might keep a record of the purchase, but it's not (or at least not always) tied to you.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#22

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

sykh wrote: post #6

lumisota wrote: post #2

The 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.

It's not really eye opening considering Apple products cost money. Their business does not lie upon selling data to advertisers or other entities.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#23

Post by falcolas » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

psergeant wrote: post #12

falcolas wrote: post #4

I 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.

You may enjoy learning more about Differential Privacy. https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/12/06/learning-with-p...

Differential Privacy and anonymous-but-unique identifiers are disjoint methods of protecting privacy. Per TFA, they appear to be using the latter.

And WRT differential privacy, if enough data is captured and associated with a single identifier, then it's sufficient to get a pretty good idea what the user actually does. That's the point of differential privacy in the first place, since it indicates that a statistically meaningful amount of the data is valid.

For example, if my user id has five visits out of 1000 DP recorded visits to google.com, it's unlikely that I actually visited google.com. However, if there are 200 recorded visits, it can be safely said that yeah, I intentionally visit google.com.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#24

Post by rocqua » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:28 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #4

I 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.

Exactly my thought. If they can connect all siri queries made by a user, it doesn't matter much if they don't store the name of that user. Deanonimisation happens easily through correlations, some correlations are really hard to predict.

Id't be better if they just didn't store an ID with the data.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#25

Post by itsdrewmiller » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

Clickbait headline - could it get changed to clarify the alleged answer is “very little”?

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#26

Post by falcolas » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #11

deaps wrote: post #3

I 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.

And then you have users who always go to the same PF Changs but use navigation in case there is traffic and they should use an alternate route. Your competitor app will learn this and adapt and yours won't. The average customer will have no idea you aren't storing their data and likely doesn't even care while they aren't reading an article about privacy. While I personally wish everyone were to take your approach is…

> always store all the data you have [...] storage is cheap.

Here's the flip side: You can't lose data to a breach that you don't store. You can't have a rogue employee crow on social media about how they have access to data you don't store. You can't be liable for GDPR violations about PII you don't store.

Data is certainly an asset, but it's also a huge liability - and laws are starting to catch up in order to enforce how big of a liability it really is.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#27

Post by toast0 » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:32 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #11

deaps wrote: post #3

I 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.

And then you have users who always go to the same PF Changs but use navigation in case there is traffic and they should use an alternate route. Your competitor app will learn this and adapt and yours won't. The average customer will have no idea you aren't storing their data and likely doesn't even care while they aren't reading an article about privacy. While I personally wish everyone were to take your approach is…

Storing lots of data indefinitely is not cheap, it has a large fixed cost to develop and maintain the storage system, incremental storage is often cheap though.

For a company like Google that may have a reasonable need to store a lot of stuff (multiple versions of the web corpus, Gmail, drive), it may be cheap to also store search queries forever and who knows what else. For a company without an intrinsic need to store large data for long periods, it's not cheap to add.

Collecting information you don't plan to use and don't know how you will use is likely to mean when you do use it, you didn't collect it in a suitable fashion, so you may not be able to use it anyway. In the meantime it's a privacy liability with no value.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#28

Post by lern_too_spel » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

sykh wrote: post #6

lumisota wrote: post #2

The 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.

It's eye opening that the author doesn't use iCloud? Why? Almost nobody uses iCloud. Each of its components is worst in class.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#29

Post by sykh » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #22

sykh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not really eye opening considering Apple products cost money. Their business does not lie upon selling data to advertisers or other entities.

But they could collect data and presumably profit more. If they did collect more data and profited from this data collection would they really lose enough customers to offset this increase in profit? It seems to me they wouldn’t. I think they are taking a moral stance on the issue at least for the time being. This may change in the future.

It is surprising though for the company not to lie about this given the shenanigans that many large companies engage in.

Re: How much does Apple know about me? The answer surprised me

#30

Post by consp » Fri, May 04, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #26

ajmurmann wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you have users who always go to the same PF Changs but use navigation in case there is traffic and they should use an alternate route. Your competitor app will learn this and adapt and yours won't. The average customer will have no idea you aren't storing their data and likely doesn't even care while they aren't reading an article about privacy. While I personally wish everyone were to take your approach is…

> always store all the data you have [...] storage is cheap. Here's the flip side: You can't lose data to a breach that you don't store. You can't have a rogue employee crow on social media about how they have access to data you don't store. You can't be liable for GDPR violations about PII you don't store. Data is certainly an asset, but it's also a huge liability - and laws are starting to catch up in order to enfo…

> Here's the flip side: You can't be lose data to a breach that you don't store.

That means NO storage, not even "anonymous". (which Apple clearly does)

> You can't have a rogue employee crow on social media about how they have access to data you don't store.

Requires NO storage, which they clearly do.

> You can't be liable for GDPR violations about PII you don't store.

If you store it "anonymous" you can, since the only requirement for it is to be personal data and there is zero change it can't lead to the person and anyone working with those 'unique' identifiers can tell you they most likely aren't that anonymous and the data can be used to trace a single person.