Is Apple trying to convince me that the Health app, Apple maps or Siri doesn’t track me?
Is Apple trying to convince me that the Health app, Apple maps or Siri doesn’t track me?
No, they are trying to convince themselves. It’s an internal brainwashing presentation after all, not for external PR.
Their slide seems to list Siri, Maps, and iAd not being tied to the user’s Apple ID as a pro. I didn’t realize this was the case.
Pot, meet kettle
They are not wrong
They are not wrong
The best lies have a bit of truth in them, by making a factual statement and then deliberately coming to a wrong conclusion. They are wrong when the second half of the claim is that Apple is somehow any different. There is tracking and analytics everywhere in Apple systems. They don’t need to formally tie the Apple ID to other tracking methods when they can just use other means to find out that two connections come from the same device.
At least in the Android world there at least is the option to go fully free of Google Services. There is no iOS Open Source Project that includes everything but a few things.
You’re making huge assumptions based on a single slide that doesn’t state it’s own conclusion. To me this easily is showing that Apple limits how data is used compared to Google, it doesn’t try to show that Apple doesn’t track you.
Google, the famous advertising company is using its hardware,software and infrastructure to watch everything we are doing?
I’m shocked.
Apple, ruthlessly opposing standards any time it can make them a buck no matter how many people have to suffer the consequences.
I’m shocked.
Buying or updating an app requires system-wide sign in
Only if one uses the official play store. Which apple does not understand, ofc.
Don’t forget our vehicles are also tracking us. Soon our Ai trainers will have enough data to guide us in their path and we’ll love what they tell us we should do.
One more advantage of the used cars I buy: the cell network they can connect to doesn’t exist anymore (the radios don’t exist, the company itself exists, but they have upgraded towers to not support older cell connections).
Yeah, but Android doesn’t make me constantly enter my password to do basic things. Also, Apple takes away a lot of control from their consumers.
I’ll take the phone that isn’t dumbed down tyvm
Ideally you shouldn’t have to compromise. GrapheneOS without Google is an option.
It literally isn’t - Graphene only supports Google Pixel phones.
You’ve apparently missed the point. Graphene exists solely to harden security and privacy by disabling the googly parts of the phone. That is clearly what was meant by “without Google”
You can do that without Graphene though
I use android and yeah, it is.
Well, it’s not like Apple doesn’t also collect pretty hair-raising information on you. Go digging through some of the sqlite databases on your machine and you’ll find eg. a social graph that even supports labels for things like political affiliations (I think this db was the one used by their ominously named “intelligence platform” service). Another db (which I think was for the
knowledgeddaemon) has an incredibly detailed log of everything you do on your computer and phone, including eg. web URLs and millisecond granularity events on when you interact with your devices. Whether that social graph or all that other stuff ever leaves your computer is unknown, but I wouldn’t count on it not being sent to Apple – regardless of what they claim.And yeah, sure, this is all to make “customer experience” better, but do you seriously believe that’s all they will be used for?
Edit: and just as a side note, I’m not basing these claims on stuff I read online, but on actually having looked at the contents of those databases myself
Could you cite the source for those dbs?
Sure!
~/Library/IntelligencePlatform(associated withintelligenceplatformd) has a bunch withgraph.dbbeing the social graph, but with others likebehaviors.dbandeventLog.dbalso likely being relevant, and I thinkontology.dbwas the one where they kept more information on the tags available for the social graph.~/Library/Application\ Support/Knowledge/knowledgeC.db(associated with Spotlight’sknowledgeconstructiond, which I think used to be calledknowledgedin earlier versions) has the other stuff I mentioned.There’s also some system-level things in eg.
/var/db/knowledgegraphd/but I haven’t bothered looking into those yet because it’d require disabling SIP.Ok, I’m just gonna come out and say it - I messed up.
I clearly have no idea what you’re saying, and I don’t even know why I expected anything even remotely simple to understand.
I apologise for wasting your time, but thank you so much for this comment, however pointless it may seem now.
Oh you didn’t waste my time at all, no worries. It’s not like copy-pasting those paths from my terminal was all that much work, and it’d definitely have been better if I’d included that info right from the start. Unfortunately I couldn’t give any blog posts etc as a source, because as I said it was all based on my own poking around in those databases, but at least I could say where the databases were so others could do some poking around of their own if they wanted to
Makes sense… Thanks alot for the nice response 🫡.
The real question when it comes to privacy is how much you can modify the device and os to get rid of the tracking.
Says them.
They’re not wrong.
Apple has a better stance on data privacy than google because their profit model is being a premium consumer device whereas googles profit model is being a provider of ads.
Apple’s incentives are closer to the consumer since they want to make the consumer happy while googles incentives are aligned with the trackers because that improves ad revenue.
This changes the DNA of the OS.
Plus the integration of googles data insecure services with android mean that as a matter of actual reality then discussing the security of android really means discussing the data security of those integrated services. It’s unavoidable.
Don’t trust either of course but I simply do have more confidence my apple data isn’t being exploited as much as my google data simply because Apple doesn’t stand as much to gain and stands more to lose from being embarrassed on the issue.
And pointing to custom android roms that replace google services with FOSS alternatives is a technically correct but still wrong answer to this because it doesn’t reflect the reality of the overwhelming majority of android users.
That is what they publicly say. However more than one company has discovered they can double dip: sell their premium devices and still track them. So long as they are not caught they get more $$$. I don’t know if Apple is, but it is a risk.
The difference is that Google is collecting everything, while Apple can collect everything.
Also, Android is not a “device”.
Android and iOS are a massive tracking operating systems. Stick to deGoogled Android and Linux on mobile.
Yes, but if you put graphene on a pixel it’s miles beyond an iphone
Congratulations to you and the other 0.000000001% of Android users then.
I would like to think that the percentage of users who have grapheneOS is maybe 5% of the pixel population. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass right now but basically a lot of people who want the very best privacy and security go for graphene which is limited to only Pixels even though there are more cool phones like the fp5.
0.000000001%
This implies the existence of 100 billion Android users, that is roughly 13 times the number of people alive.
TL;DR: the slide is from 2013, everybody calm your pants.
Does this also go for custom roms like GrapheneOS?
Nope. It’s just in reference to Google login being used across the board.
