Comment by NelsonMinar

3 years ago

Everyone's focussing on the small fine but the bigger story here is it's Apple. They've gotten the reputation for being the user privacy company, for protecting you from ad companies like Google/Alphabet or Facebook. Turns out they're acting like another invasive ad company themselves. The fine may not be big but the symbolism of it is.

11 comments

NelsonMinar

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ericpauley  3 years ago

An alternate interpretation might be that the laws are so strict and arcane than even Apple, who seems to be trying to do everything right, is fined.

  • neon_electro  3 years ago

    Can we give a multi-national company worth billions of dollars with a staff dedicated to legal compliance a bit less benefit of the doubt?

    It seems like Apple clearly violated the policy it rightly should establish for any software on iOS. They deserve the penalty.

    • ericpauley  3 years ago

      This was an opt-in issue in one OS component (albeit an important one) in one version that has since been fixed. For sure apple should not have let this happen, but I don’t see this as indicative of some evil anti-privacy plot. Apple made a mistake and paid a fine for it.

      1 reply →

  • lucb1e  3 years ago

    > who seems to be trying to do everything right

    They chose to use tracking tokens in the first place. By default a computer does nothing, someone was tasked to write this. Apparently they did something wrong, maybe it was an honest mistake, but I find it a stretch to just assume or expect they are necessarily choosing what's best for users (and leaving money on the table) without more info than is public.

  • mqus  3 years ago

    maybe strict but arcane? It's pretty much the same "law" that apple put facebook under: Make personalization of ads optional and turn it off by default or at least make it equally easy to opt out and opt in (=forced choice).

    And this "arcane rule" is pretty much 50% of everything you read about GDPR (heard of cookie dialogs? they are not just banners anymore due to GDPR). Hardly arcane to me.

ocdtrekkie  3 years ago

Eh, this is a massive false equivalence. Yeah, it'd be really preferable if Apple didn't do ads. They also are the hot dog stand of ad vendors; everyone else is way, way bigger.

The difference is so obvious: Apple Maps doesn't even associate locations or directions to your Apple ID. Google stores your location at five minute intervals. The difference in privacy attitudes is vast.

  • sebow  3 years ago

    You're right, but in the grand scheme of things whataboutism is irrelevant. As per some analysis in a paper of this on android & iOS (the name of which i don't recall, but can search for it), the main difference between the collection is not that big: Google collects more quantity whereas Apple collects every kind of data, but not as frequently.

    People talked as if Apple did not and would not ever do such things, which was obviously false. Both companies profit by the fact that we keep pointing fingers in this sadistic duopoly and not look at the actual issue of privacy. I wished people showed more interest when in was more "fashionable" to talk of such issues, but back when snowden/assange/smaller individuals did it, the discussion always ended up with ad homiminems and irrelevant points directed to the messenger. The only difference between back then & now are the perpetrators: it used to be the governments, nowadays is companies (and governments colluding with them, which is arguably worse as corporations cannot be as easily held accountable).