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> Essentially, Apple is forcing advertisers to use a per-app permission pop-up with scary language, telling users the app wants permission to track them across other apps and websites. > But notice the significantly scarier language: “’Pal About’ would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies.” > This is language that is likely designed to minimize opt-in. Love how honest languag…
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Apple may be certainly far from perfect when it comes to favoring their own software, but to say the company as a whole is aggressively "anti-user" is just hogwash. Updates they have made to Safari, the App Store, and iOS generally have made millions of people more conscious of how applications they use every day consume and interact with their personal information. They've inspired other companies like Google to fol…
This is evidence of the reality distortion field. It's like when they made the argument why Netflix/Spotify should pay them 30% of the proceeds of all sales because it's good for consumers and people actually bought it.
The problem both of these companies had was that the option to sign up in-app and have Apple manage the subscription was more popular than they hoped.
> Essentially, Apple is forcing advertisers to use a per-app permission pop-up with scary language, telling users the app wants permission to track them across other apps and websites. > But notice the significantly scarier language: “’Pal About’ would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies.” > This is language that is likely designed to minimize opt-in. Love how honest languag…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My complaint is not about the initial permission, it's about the thing that regularly appears in iOS to suggest that you might have changed your mind and would you like to disable location access for some app. This never pops up for Apple's apps. There's also another way they exempt themselves, by allowing you to disable microphone for third-party apps but not offering to disable microphone access for Voice Memos, Ca…
Yeah: I get this prompt over and over again for the Tile application, and it is ridiculously annoying; if/when Apple launches their own Tile competitor, obviously their app will not be subject to the same handicap, and people might very well choose Apple's version simply because they won't get nagged constantly "are you sure you like Tile?!". That's clear anti-competitive behavior, in the same space as "tying" and "b…
> Essentially, Apple is forcing advertisers to use a per-app permission pop-up with scary language, telling users the app wants permission to track them across other apps and websites. > But notice the significantly scarier language: “’Pal About’ would like permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies.” > This is language that is likely designed to minimize opt-in. Love how honest languag…
You've left out a critical part, which explains the "minimize opt-in" comment: > In contrast, Apple’s own advertising service looks to enable personalization by default, giving it a platform-level advantage over competitors. And the language in Apple's settings is quite different as well, they claim that their "advertising platform is designed to protect your privacy". That doesn't sound invasive, quite the opposite,…
Apple exempts all their iOS software from their own privacy scaremongering. iOS never pops up a scary dialog warning you that Camera has accessed your location twice in the last week, even though Camera accesses your location every time you start it. There is a completely separate iOS privacy regime for Apple's own apps.
Scaremongering isn't the right way to describe a real, well-documented ongoing concern. We have a long history of app developers trying to monetize their user's privacy, and that also explains why your comparison is inaccurate: if you buy an iOS device you are already trusting Apple. If you don't trust Camera to do nothing more than geotag your photos, you can't use iOS at all because every mechanism which would prot…
That’s the honest truth, but they don’t put it there because it would bother people.
It’s oddly convenient to say it’s true for one case, but for the other case it’s okay because it’s Apple.
One day we will learn that ultimately we cannot trust a corporation - as that is a moving target - but instead trust reasonable operating principles for data security and privacy.
And for what it is worth.. I’d rather override all of my data that Apple collects to be stored on servers in the US. It’s nothing against China... but everything against their government.
It’s worth noting I have similar concerns with the US government too, but it is a small step in a better direction.
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And Apple is 100% sure of exactly what happens with that location data. I'd be happy to get some limited exceptions to this, like "3rd party camera apps can get pre-granted location access, but only if the developer agrees that the location data will be used for nothing but EXIF tags, and if it is ever found to have left the device the developer gets delisted from the app store."
There isn't a box inside of Apple HQ marked 'location data, do not eat', so Apple isn't actually 100% sure where the location data is. There are numerous safeguards, both in their device and the online platform to try and make sure it never leaks, but no one other than their marketing team would say 100%.
If the iPhone calculator app team said "We're going to turn this into a social calculator and it's going to use your photo library to automatically identify receipts to calculate tips and splits, and we're going to do the image processing on the server and make a database of where we identified your receipts to help with identifying restaurant payment locations," somebody higher up would tell them "No, we need to do receipt recognition all on-device." That makes it a lot easier to avoid accidental data leakage.