this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Thanks for this. I did ask OP for a source on Apple selling user data. It sounds like you're saying that they don't.
There's always a rush to include Apple with the other big tech firms that certainly do harvest and sell user data, I guess some people just love to hate on Apple. I get popups on a fresh install of an Apple OS and on first launching certain apps that asks me outright if I want to send usage data to Apple. It's pretty upfront about this. Like you said, it's anonymized so it can't be used to target me with ads based on my browsing history. They also have the Private Relay feature on MacOS and Hide My Email, they didn't have to do that. There's also something called Advanced Data Protection that I haven't messed around with.
Do you haven't any evidence for this? I doubt that's something Apple would be happy about.
Honestly, I think you're really arguing over the technical definition of "sell".
Yeah but do you know what data is being sent? Most people have no idea (you might, I'm just saying most people). My position is if people don't know what's in the data, then they aren't really agreeing to it with full knowledge.
I've seen the data (from my own apps), and I can see how easy it is to link crash reports to users. Crash reports include a unique device identifier and also loads of information about the device the moment it crashed. It's trivial to compare all of that data to other data the app collects and find out which user the crash report belongs to.
I'm sure it's a violation of the terms of service, but developers violate those all the time and enforcement is almost unheard of. When Apple catches an app breaking the rules, they usually just tell the developer to stop. Damage is already done by then.
Have a listen to this to get an idea how widespread this is: https://subclub.com/episode/app-store-ethics-dark-patterns-and-rule-breakers-steve-p-young-app-masters