My problem with this is that it is pure marketing play. Apple isn't doing anything really great to enhance user privacy in absolutes - all they are doing is having all your data and not letting anyone else benefit from it - right now. Which is to say Apple still does benefit from your data in direct or indirect ways.<p>They are still, by default recording all your search queries on OS X. And Apple supporters' justification for that is well, Apple isn't a company whose revenue and profits are mostly dependent on ads. But if you look at facts, Apple wants to get a big pie of everything, not just hardware. And they go out of their way to try and get it - book sales (ref: antitrust case), iAd, Maps, Streaming Music - the list goes on and on.<p>Given this, how do you claim Apple won't use your recorded search queries or music you listened to (Genius Recommendations) or location data or whatever else they record and we don't yet know about - to increase their profits? They sure as hell will - that's why they are collecting the data in first place.<p>Google is doing the same thing by showing you ads that may be of interest to you, analyzing your Google Voicemails to increase their speech recognition accuracy, making their maps data more robust by giving you the best Navigation app for free, giving you useful reminders by looking at your email - they are doing it now and in return they are providing you with great products you can optionally use.<p>To claim that Google is doing something evil while Apple is not purely because they make money on hardware is naive and too simplistic. (Case in point - Microsoft made most of their money selling you boxed software - now a days they want you to use their services and will provide you with a free upgrade to Windows and free online Office suite down the line. They did not care about your data before, but now they do!)<p>Fact is you can either place reasonable trust on Google or Apple and continue to be part of the modern world or just drop all your devices, bank accounts, cards, get a car from 1970s and move off the grid. As much as it sounds harsh there isn't really such a thing as 100% privacy. Your data will always be vulnerable to becoming public in various degrees and to various effects.
This would have sounded credible if Apple didn't have an iAds business that mines user clicks and offers retargetting ads to paying customers.<p>Instead, now, this sounds like Microsoft's Scroogle campaign, where it accused Google of doing all the things that Bing also did, but wasn't successful at doing.
It's a clever pivot by Tim Cook. He figured out that Apple is awful at selling advertising and has turned this into a marketing feature.<p>Steve Jobs was very excited about advertising, remember him describing iAds as a life changing experience that users would love? It completely failed, but hey.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/KwVaILbTqS8?t=45m55s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KwVaILbTqS8?t=45m55s</a>
"Our business is based on selling products, not on having information about you. You are not our product."<p>Pretty easy to say "we don't do this" when it's not even a <i>significant</i> part of your revenue stream.<p>Sort of like if Zuckerberg said "Our business is based on selling advertising, not on selling premium, high markup shiny things".
If Apple is serious, the next step will be to open up the source for the encryption parts of iMessage, FaceTime, etc with the ability to verify the binaries, much like PGP used to do for their software. And also to verify the keys being used in the messaging to make sure additional keys aren't being added by apple.
In reality using Apple products reduces your privacy. How ?<p>If you use Google's products(and who doesn't use Google Search ? ) , Google already knows plenty about you. And even if you don't use Google products, Google knows plenty about you, since it's tracking software is installed in large percentage of sites, etc.<p>And if you add machine learning on top of that , the amount that Google knows about you is great - even if you use Apple's products.<p>In reality, by using Apple's products, you don't gain privacy , you lose privacy - now two companies know a lot about you, instead of one.<p>Also this exposes your data for security bugs from both companies - thus making it easier for third parties to go at it.
Google's and Facebook's business models revolve around analysing user data and using it for advertising. Apple makes money from hardware.<p>I think most users are aware of this, and in return for free or low cost products they sign away part of their privacy.<p>The reason Google Photos offers unlimited storage, Gmail is free etc is they can deep learn the f... out of their users to target their ads better.<p>Apple's privacy benefit is more of a side effect of their business model than a principle they design their products based on.
see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9652298" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9652298</a>