This pretty surprising. Given the industry standard with mining similar communications I'm surprised that Apple gave up a gigantic pool of user information like that.
Follow the money. Collecting user information is (in most cases) a distraction for Apple that could blow up in their face and lead to a serious PR fallout. See locationgate. See Path's address book shenanigans.
It's in their best interest not only not to secretly collect user information, they also want to show that they care about stuff like that (because then they can point their finger at others).
Apple cares about credit card info (because that allows them to let their customers easily pay for everything, it lowers the barrier), but Apple doesn't have to covertly collect that, they are far too popular to need such shady tactics. And that's about it. iAds might matter, but it seems to be a flop and Apple isn't exactly heavily invested in it.
> iAds might matter, but it seems to be a flop and Apple isn't exactly heavily invested in it.
Even further, iMessage accounts are tied to existing Apple IDs, which in most cases are tied to the user's iPhone and iTunes Store account. If Apple wanted to profile users of their iMessage system, they don't need to scan private communications, they'll just recommend albums, books and movies based on previous purchase history. It's more relevant to their business domain than trying to gleam whether or not Alice and Bob are in a relationship and expecting a child soon.
locationgate is actually what gave me the impression that this would be relevant to them. You make persuasive points though.
Incidentally, I'm not so convinced that collecting user information leads to as big of a PR fallout as HN often suggests. I think it's more likely that the level to which our community -- which is small compared to the general UB -- gets upset makes it easy for us to overestimate public reaction. See: facebook and gmail. I'm not very familiar with Path though. Has there been much of an impact since the phonebook incident?
I'm not sure about that. I saw articles about that on the front page of big news websites. Apple is a big deal, the press will report on them. Even worse: They will report about the scandal but likely not about steps someone takes to mitigate the problem or things that explain the problem. That way we here on HN might know very well every little detail about a scandal (including things that make the scandal less of a big deal) but the general public might not.
Apple almost always puts respect for the end user (the paying customer) as one of its highest priorities. Off the top of my head, some examples would be: not forcing users to enter license keys for software, dropping DRM from iTunes, blocking third-party cookies by default, and their refusal to allow the carriers to pollute the iPhone with their preloaded software.
Now I just wish they would make it easy for me to set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in Safari.
"As part of a more stringent ruleset regarding customer privacy, Apple has reportedly started rejecting apps which access UDIDs in a practice that will become de rigueur for all review teams".
