They all spy on all of us all the time, Apple is no different. Apple probably has more data on their users than any other company out there. So far there are no known instances of Apple selling this information, most likely because they believe they get better value by keeping the information for themselves. But they still spy on users and it is only one step from keeping all that data for themselves to selling it to boost profits or charging fees to keep it private.
If it were all lies there would be lawsuits from the FTC and EU regulators, and there simply isn’t. Because advertising is not a significant part of Apple’s business model, profiling users is a liability that they prefer to avoid. This does slow down the introduction of features. For instance Google images had usable face recognition for years before Apple because Google does it in the cloud. It happens on device for Apple, and it takes longer to scan photos for faces. A slightly worse experience, but worth it in many consumers eyes.
But, I mean apple even does wacky stuff like creating unique ids for each trip you route on maps that isn’t tied to your user id, and fuzzes the precise location using differential privacy for product improvement. You can read all about it in the white papers at the link I provided above.
I agree that Apple makes it very difficult for other entities to track you but Apple themselves can track you and nowhere in their privacy info does it say they they can't or don't. The devil is in the detail. For instance: "Apple does not maintain a comprehensive user data profile of your activity across all our products and services to serve you targeted advertising."
A naive reading of that sentence would be that Apple does not keep data on users. But that is not what that sentence says - they just don't use that data for targeted advertising. And as we all know these policies are subject to change at any time so even targeted advertising might become the part of the agreement without users noticing or having any say in it.
Again, read the white papers. The details go beyond either a naive or cynical reading of things that they highlight on the webpage that consumers are most interested in.
So $3T company that advertises privacy focus cannot unambiguously say on their web page about their privacy policy that they do not store data about users?
Either they are incompetent in which case I don't really trust their attempt to protect my privacy or they are intentionally obtuse in which case I actually do trust that they know what they are doing and they store data on their users just like they say they do on they web page about privacy policy.
Look, you can go ahead and trust them and that is fine. Just ask yourself what is the chance that Apple is the ONLY big tech company in the world that does not spy on its users.
Apple does have a checkbox for "please learn things about me and serve me personalized ads" as well as another checkbox for "please send my analytics data back to you, I wanna share". Therefore they cannot categorically say they don't do it. But they certainly seem not to do it when those check boxes are off.
I’d like to assume (because I literally have no way of finding otherwise) Apple spies on us more than other platforms.
It’s so tightly locked down and locked in that most of the ways you control tracking on other platforms are either impossible or frustratingly hard and cumbersome on Apple devices, let alone services.
Top that with most of those services being much inferior to competition without a doubt other than the polished looks (and even that’s doubtful).
Strange assumption. Apple certainly make claims that they don't (which can result in nasty legal consequences if they are lung), provides access to the data they collect on you on phone, allow people to opt out data collection.
And that's all public. It's possible they're lying. Maybe you know they are lying. But unless you do it seems like a weird assumption.
Re: spying, ostensibly both WhatsApp and iMessage messages are E2E encrypted, so I don’t really see a huge difference here (it still leaves either company with valuable metadata, but at least it’s better than nothing).
Re: SMS, isn’t this entire thread about how SMS isn’t seen as a viable (on par with iMessage) alternative?
AFAIK, WhatsApp's client does a lot of tracking itself, it just observing the messages. I've also thought (esp. in the past) that WhatsApp claims if e2e didn't hold up irl.
Meanwhile, yes this article is about how sms isn't a replacement. It's silly, because here and elsewhere people are saying the only place what the greentext nonsense exists is in articles like this.
