And this, my friend, is exactly what I came here for. Very insightful, informative and measured answer. Thank you for taking the time 👍🏻
Comment on "Best" Mac browser: Your view
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t have a Mac but I can offer you a viewpoint: in general it is better to compartmentalise your data and if you’re using products by the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc) then to separate date between them as much as possible. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
If you’re on a Mac, you’re in Apple’s ecosystem. In some ways they provide better privacy as they’re not as dependent on advertising like Google for example, however they do have advertising buisness and are still mining your data and profiling you as it’s their business to sell you stuff whether that’s more Apple hardware or digital content.
So I personally wouldn’t be using all their various apps without knowing in detail what data is going to them. Web browsers, email and calendars are data gold mines, as are anywhere you shop for content such as App stores, music, video etc.
If I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox so as to wall off as much as my data from Apple as possible. I’d also consider Thunderbird for email & calendar to remove Apple from that data trove. I personally also pay for my email service rather than using anything bundled in (i.e. iCloud) - the reason being you’re not beholden to one provider longterm and can access and migrate your data on other devices (e.g. not Apple in the case of iCloud).
Apple tries to sell itself as a bastion of privacy. It’s not - it’s probably a bit better than some of it’s competitors but it still is involved in user tracking and selling data to advertisers. They made a fanfare about letting users disable advertiser tracking on iPhones but what they didn’t make as much noise about is that they actually built the tracking tools in the first place, and they’ve been building their advertising business as the services side of Apple is big money (it’s app store, it’s content etc)
schmurnan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I am on the Apple ecosystem as well. I use Safari with ad blockers and a few other extensions. If a website gives me problems, I switch to Firefox. I don’t think I have ever been “served” an advertisement for an Apple product from Apple. To my knowledge, they are not using my data for things like that, and if they are, they are being far cleverer about it than I am able to deduce. That said, I am almost completely switched over to Proton Mail, and am slowly moving to the entire Proton Suite. I was in fact getting ready to move all my icloud.com files To Proton Drive so I can stop paying Apple $10 a month for 2TB of cloud storage. I’m still working on the password thing. If anyone knows of an easy way to switch, and can report that it is as effective as the icloud password system, by all means let me know.
schmurnan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I have/had a ProtonMail account, and whilst it was great, I believe it was only end-to-end encrypted when sending emails to other people using ProtonMail…? Or at least that was my understanding at the time.
The apps back then weren’t particularly polished, so I ended up migrating everything back to iCloud.
To be honest, I don’t seem to have any issues with iCloud and everything just works. But that’s the problem with Apple, and how they “get” you.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
don’t put all your eggs in one basket
That’s a good approach - but there’s a better one. If at all possible stick to software that uses standard data formats and is able to interact with other software. For example Lemmy uses Markdown (a standard) and it can interact with other software (on the fediverse).
Unfortunately I don’t know of any (good) web browser that does that. It’s certainly possible for bookmarks/tabs/settings/etc to be synced between browsers, but in general browsers only ever support once off imports, they never actively maintain a shared set of data between browsers.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Do you have a source on Apple selling user data?
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
As an iOS/Mac app developer — Apple doesn’t “sell” data to me, but they absolutely provide me with user tracking data for free (well, for $99 per year, but that’s effectively free). As far as I know they also provide data to other third parties, such as in the news app/etc. But app developers is the big one.
The data is anonymised, but I assure you it’s very detailed.
Thankfully the tracking is opt-in, but users are forced to make a choice and encouraged to enable tracking and I’d argue they really aren’t being educated properly on what they’re handing over before making a decision. I can’t really blame Apple for that, who wants to spend hours learning how Apple’s tracking methods work? Almost nobody. But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share that data with third parties.
Personally I have spent hours doing that research and I’m not OK with what they track — I opt out. And while my own software does have some tracking, it’s a lot less detailed than the tracking Apple does. It’s just basic analytics (roughly how many users do I have and what country are they from?) and crash reporting which is (thankfully) rare with my software and therefore useless for any invasive tracking. The vast majority of people using my apps never experience a crash.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honestly, I think you’re really arguing over the technical definition of “sell”.
I’ve seen the data (from my own apps), and I can see how easy it is to cross reference.
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.