Comment on "Best" Mac browser: Your view

• 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.

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  • 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.

    Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.

    Do you haven’t any evidence for this? I doubt that’s something Apple would be happy about.

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    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It sounds like you’re saying that they don’t.

      Honestly, I think you’re really arguing over the technical definition of “sell”.

      Do you haven’t any evidence for this?

      I’ve seen the data (from my own apps), and I can see how easy it is to cross reference.

      I doubt that’s something Apple would be happy about.

      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.

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