As do all the competitors… but they can also access your photos for random data mining. Which no one has shown Apple do that. We know 100% google do it…
While I’m sure Apple collects ample (pseudo anonymous) data from their respective stores about patterns, they actually don’t gather that much data about you.
For a long time they’ve had an “on device” policy to handling data. Buy a new phone and your frequently visited locations list is empty. Most of their AI stuff only lives on your device.
Of course there are limits to what can be handled on your device, but they’re generally pretty open about what happens where.
Make no mistake, the privacy stance is a profit maker for Apple, and that’s the real reason they’re doing it.
In any case, I’m way more likely to trust Apple with my data than Google or Microsoft. Google and (to some extent) Microsoft has based their business around collecting and/or selling my data, Apple makes a living by selling me hardware and software, and privacy is the one parameter that Apple can compete on that will directly reduce profits of its competitors.
Given that Apple keeps a hash of your fingerprints stored on the device in a way that even Apple can't get to it (and I would assume something similar for the facial scan stuff) how are they in the same league as Facebook?
Apple doesn't even share the facial recognition data for iPhoto between your own devices.
Facebook has a profile of every one they've ever seen in a picture and can guess who they are even if they're not on Facebook.
Idk. It looks like Apple is happy to sell you the hardware to do the image recognition etc on your own device and receive the result. They can claim privacy and save on computation.
For the record I don’t believe Apple is collecting that info - having said that I think the biggest issue with Apple is that it is not possible to fully audit and determine what they collect and what they don’t. Just because they aren’t constantly sending hashes over the internet after viewing each photo in finder doesn’t mean that similar data isn’t collected at all over the many encrypted connections apple maintains with their servers and Mac computers.
It would be colossally stupid for them to betray user trust in that way as it would almost certainly come out eventually, but that doesn’t change the trust problem they ultimately do have.
Apple have made it a point of differentiation against Google and Facebook in particular.
They say that they try to do as much processing on device as possible and when data (for stuff like Maps) is submitted centrally, they anonymise the data collection - so they can learn usage information without knowing who it's from.
We don't know exactly how effective this is, as they are a secretive company, and this doesn't mean that bugs and breaches don't happen. But they make the point that, as their revenue comes from products and services, not targeted advertising, they don't need that data collection in order to grow the business.
Which is why Apple protects your data in a way they can't access it - in the event that they change into Google and Facebook in future they have no access to the current information.
Some people here need to read Apple's privacy policy. They go to extreme lengths to make sure no identifiable information leaves the device. Often times where Google sends information to the cloud to be processed (e.g. Photos data), Apple does the computation on-device. This is true for many things: analysis of photos, voice recognition, ML tasks, etc.
This seems suspicious to me. Apple does most if not all ML/data-mining on the device where-as competitors do it in the cloud. My assumption is they are positioning themselves this way to grab consumers later should regulations hit cloud services collecting data externally. Apple can say it is all on device and don't have access while other companies will have to say they have your data. Ultimately the motives are the same.
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.
I am pretty sure that Apple does not save your image data in any database. Apple is really trying to differentiate itself on privacy.
Also, I don't think that this sends any data to Google, since it trains the neural net in the browser. You could even verify this yourself by looking at the source code.
I think they make a point of this fairly regularly, double blind machine learning (apologies if this is the wrong phrase..) and also on device facial recognicitan - ie. not on apples servers (as in Google’s / facebooks case).
I think it is highly unlikely to come out that they are selling company data. Look at all the comments that Tim Cook made about Facebook - that he wouldn’t be in that situation as it would compromise his morals etc..
This information would have already been leaked by an Apple insider or a third party which pay Apple for user metadata. As neither have occurred, I'm inclined to believe they do not sell their user's data.
Google on the other hand have an entire business model which sells your data. I know who I'd trust with my data and TBH, I think you're just throwing stones without understanding your own subconscious bias against Apple.
Apple, as opposed to Google and Facebook, "don't capture your data" to sell their product. That's their brand, and it has made them millions. They do give your data without question to authorities, without a fight. These battles are costly and the bottom line is the bottom line and money > people when it comes to FB, Google and Apple =/ but that's the world we live in, so I can't really blame them. We reap what we sew.
They obviously sell user data in aggregate - not at a personal level, but which of the big tech companies sell personal data (maybe FB / Cambridge Analytica?)
Also, Apple has Google as the default search engine which Google pays billions for. Is that selling your personal data?
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