Comment by simonw
1 year ago
> Apple lost a lawsuit over Siri spying "inadvertently" very recently
That's what my article is about: it's about how I'm certain people will use this settled-out-of-court lawsuit as "evidence" that Apple are spying and targeting ads, but it's very clear that's not what was happening here.
Apple settled because they knew they would lose. Winning is good PR since they (falsely) claim to be favorable for privacy. They are only superficially better than Google in that regard. I did skim your article and it's not as bad as I thought. I think you really mean it when you say these are just coincidences. But they're not.
Another one I forgot to mention: Google explicitly tracks your location history unless you turn it off, and you'd be foolish to think that they won't (or couldn't) save the data anyway. People have done experiments showing dramatic improvements in battery life using AOSP without Google telemetry and spyware.
The Google track your location history thing is true. You can confirm by using Google takeout to extract your location history.
The microphone thing is false. You can try the takeout feature (or equivalent) across multiple providers to confirm that.
I don't trust takeout features completely, honestly. Takeout only gives you YOUR data and not all your acquaintances' data, which can be assembled by companies you don't even know exist to profile YOU. The companies you deal with then have no obligation to share it with you, because to them they are only leasing access to data that they sold off or some crap. It's like how the government can't collect this data but they can buy it. The same trick is everywhere.
I seriously don't trust anything on a very deep level. Like I said, I've seen too much evidence that these companies are run by snakes that can only be trusted in certain ways. You might not agree, and I'm not prepared to argue all that tonight (I keep hitting the comment rate limit anyway). Just try to remain skeptical both ways if you don't believe we're being spied on, ok?
I hate corporations as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy) but the argument that "it wasn't proven they were doing it which proves they were doing it" is probably the worst one you could have come up with tbh.
That case dragged on for 5 years, and ended up with them paying $95 million anyway. I think if they could have proved that they weren't doing it, they would have. Maybe I didn't say that clearly but it makes a lot of sense.
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