All of Apple’s privacy budget went directly to the marketing department. Turns out, advertising something is cheaper and more effective than actually implementing it.
New study reveals that the sun is hot
Why do some people still think that Apple somehow respects your privacy? iOS is just another closed source OS that spies on you and since it’s closed source you cannot audit it’s code either.
Copying from my reddit comment I made half a year ago:
I avoided posting the clickbait headline articles and waited. Some clickbait FUD articles are doing the rounds, promoting and praising Apple. Quoting u/Ph0X, who debunked one of those well at https://reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mgd78w/_/gstgq8a?context=3 :
As always on reddit, no one actually read the article and people just upvote based on their preconceived notions. If you look at the very first figure, you can see that Apple sends back the exact same data, if not more.
But while the Irish researcher found that Apple tends to collect more information data types from an iOS device, it was Google that collected “a notably larger volume of handset data.”
“During the first 10 minutes of startup the Pixel handset sends around 1MB of data is sent to Google compared with the iPhone sending around 42KB of data to Apple,” Prof. Leith said.
So the entire basis of the headline is literally in how many bytes it sends, which is stupid as fuck. It’s like when people did a “Google Takeout” and compared the size of that to takeout from other companies, missing the fact that said takeout could contain data from Drive/Youtube (huge video files and so on). Bytes mean very little here. By that logic if I compress the data better, I’m suddenly spying less?
This data collection process takes place every 264 seconds on idle Apple devices and once 255 seconds on Android smartphones
Oh wow, Google collects data on average 3% more frequently than Apple!
But in addition to the idle state, the Irish researcher said that both operating systems also share data with their central servers when users are browsing their settings screens.
Furthermore, when a new SIM card is inserted into both iOS and Android devices, SIM details are shared with both Apple and Google almost immediately.
So the study actually found that both systems are more or less identical when it comes to collecting data, but the headline went for the clickbait based on a flawed notion than more bytes = more personal information, just to get clicks.
Falls in line with what I have been saying for well over a couple years even regarding the previous DCN Android vs iOS Data Collection 2018 report (https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DCN-Google-Data-Collection-Paper.pdf).
